A decade's worth of IPv4 addresses

Just like with any other scarce item we'll see more and more tricks to wring the last out of what we've got.<p>The good news is that an IP address that is given out can be reclaimed, so it's not like oil or some other finite substance in a sense that once used it stays used for ever.<p>I'd expect a couple of stop-gap measures before we're finally forced to switch to something better:<p><pre><code> - a premium on releasing your DHCP lease while you sleep - pressure from colocation facilities to reduce the number of IPs assigned to a single host - consolidation of IP addresses for hosting providers behind NAT'ing routers - more usage of ports vs IP addresses since that effectively allows you to extend the 32 bit field in to a 48 bit field - a price set on the usage of an IP </code></pre> Then, only when we're really scraping the bottom we'll switch and it will cost a fortune compared to what a switch in '96 would have cost.<p>Typical human behaviour, we're doing it with oil I don't see why IP addresses would be any different, in fact I think we'll learn a lot about how the energy situation will develop from monitoring this closely.

I wish they had a graph showing the growth by year of IPv4 usage and how that compares to the amount of space available with IPv6.<p>Edit #1: I found one interesting comparison graph:<p><a href="http://www.caida.org/research/topology/as_core_network/pics/ascore-ipv4-ipv6.200903_poster_1250x850.png" rel="nofollow">http://www.caida.org/research/topology/as_core_network/pics/...</a><p>Edit #2: Another interesting map which has a "You are here" marker:<p><a href="http://icicle.dylex.net/~ipmap/" rel="nofollow">http://icicle.dylex.net/~ipmap/</a><p>And a presentation with a good number of graphs showing demand and growth over the past 5-10 years.<p><a href="http://www.potaroo.net/presentations/2006-06-28-ipv4.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.potaroo.net/presentations/2006-06-28-ipv4.pdf</a>

The switch of mobile devices from 2G/3G technology using IPv4 to LTE (aka 4G) using IPv6 will fix a large amount of this, "As IPv4 increasingly became the de facto standard for networked digital communication, the cost of embedding substantial computing power into handheld devices dropped. Mobile phones have become viable Internet hosts. New specifications of 4G devices require IPv6 addressing."<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion#Mobile_devices" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion#Mobile_...</a><p>IPv4 runs as a subset of IPv6 for those of you not into the IP stuff too deep. IPv6 devices can talk to IPv4 through border devices similar to NAT today so we can use "private" RFC1918 addresses.

In a way, isn't this kind of good? We're always going to be running short until the move to IPv6, and I've heard a number of consumer internet providers are starting to provide IPv6 addresses upon request.<p>Running out is going to happen eventually, so it might as well happen sooner, rather then later.