An official press release wrote on Friday morning that North America has run out of IPv4 addresses. The American Registry for Internet Numbers announced this will happen several months ago when they first reported there were only a few addresses left to assign.
I never thought the day would come for me to say humanity has run short of Internet. Yet, ARIN has recently announced that there are no more IPv4 addresses for Internet users and they will soon have to switch to IPv6 figures.
For those of you who may not be familiar with the subject, the IPv6 addresses represent a modern version of IPv4 figures. The latter were introduced in the 80s and consisted of 32-bit combinations. The latest IPv6 addresses come to replace the older versions, so they present improved features. They are 128-bit protocol that offer more space and, hence, more speed for data transmission.
The moment when the Internet would run out of IPv4 addresses has long been anticipated. This is, in fact, why the new IP addresses have been created. Yet, very few people have actually paid attention to the warnings that ARIN has issued.
Technologists think all space problems will be eliminated once the transition towards the new Internet addresses will be completed. IPv6 has the ability to offer us approximately 340 undecillion addresses, whereas with the IPv4 we could barely make it to 4 billion addresses.
Experts worry that the rapid transition could cause conflicts between the IP addresses of visitors’ devices and those of websites. They fear North America is still missing the necessary infrastructure for IPv6, although the United States represent the third country to use the new Internet addresses on a global scale.
Companies have reassured consumers that there won’t be any problems related to the introduction of the new Internet addresses. They have stated that most companies have already replaced old addresses when ARIN first informed they were running out of IPv4.
Smart phone companies have done such a good job replacing Internet Protocols that clients were not even aware of the transition. Some large Internet providers are using networks that are compatible with the two types of Internet addresses because they think this will help ease the transition.
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