The Future of IPv4: How Long Will It Remain Relevant? (2024)

FAQs

The Future of IPv4: How Long Will It Remain Relevant? ›

Estimated Lifespan of IPv4

It is currently expected that the public IPv4 address pool will be entirely depleted by 2021. There is a substantial amount of IPv4 address space (so-called legacy addresses) that was previously assigned to organisations and never used, or were assigned for experimental purposes and are no longer required.

No, we're not running out – we've already run out. 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses kept us going for a while, there. But it turns out the number of possible combinations of a 32-digit code doesn't provide anywhere near enough individual IP addresses for everyone to get online. IPv4 address exhaustion is a global problem.

IPv6 is the next generation Internet Protocol (IP) address standard intended to supplement and eventually replace IPv4, the protocol many Internet services still use today.

On 24 September 2015 ARIN declared exhaustion of the ARIN IPv4 addresses pool. On 25 November 2019, RIPE NCC announced that it had made its "final /22 IPv4 allocation from the last remaining addresses in our available pool." On 21 August 2020, LACNIC announced that it had made its final IPv4 allocation.

In November 2019, we exhausted our remaining IPv4 pool. This means that networks in Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia are no longer able to receive “new” IPv4 addresses from us that haven't previously been used by another network.

IPv8 has been obsoleted.

A static IP address can be either IPv6 or IPv4. It is manually assigned to the device and cannot be easily updated. A complete machine reset will be required to modify the static IP address. This can be troublesome if the device requires multiple IP addresses at different locations, for example, a mobile phone.

However, the explosive growth of the internet and connected devices has exhausted this pool, leading to IPv4 address depletion. The situation has necessitated the development of IPv6, a more robust protocol with a significantly larger address space.

It is an unreliable protocol since it does not ensure that a datagram will reach its intended location. The top layer protocols, like TCP/IP, must guarantee reliability. The internet protocol (IP) is the internet protocol suite's network layer communication protocol used to transmit datagrams across network borders.

Does anyone still use IPv4? ›

IPv4 is the most widely used version of the Internet Protocol, which has been in use since the early days of the Internet. However, the rapid growth of the Internet and the exhaustion of IPv4 address have made it imperative to move to IPv6. Despite the clear advantages that IPv6 offers, it is still not widely used.

It is essential to note that IPv4 will not disappear overnight. The two protocols will coexist for the foreseeable future, and backward compatibility measures will ensure that IPv4-only devices can still access IPv6 services.

Address Space: IPv6 provides a significantly larger address space than IPv4, which helps reduce the need for technologies like Network Address Translation (NAT). NAT can introduce some security challenges, as it hides internal IP addresses and can complicate certain network security configurations.

Future perspectives

Widespread adoption of IPv6: As IPv4 addresses continue to be scarce, the adoption of IPv6 is expected to accelerate. IPv6 not only provides a practically inexhaustible pool of IP addresses but also offers improved functionality in terms of routing, auto-configuration, and security.

It can change depending on whether you're connected at home or some other location. In any case, years ago the IP addressing system was set up to accommodate millions of IP addresses that might be needed one day. In fact, there are today about 4.3 billion IPv4-type IP addresses throughout the entire world.

It will change based on to which network you connected . The reason is because your PC is configured to get IP address automatically from the DHCP server or DHCP features that your router has. The DHCP server will provide the IP address within the pool range of ip addresses that has been configured.

Internet users won't notice the effect of IPv4 depletion in the foreseeable future. However, in the future there might be parts of the Internet that you cannot reach if the website or service is an IPv6-only network and your Internet Service Provider (ISP) does not provide its customers with IPv6 addresses.

As a result, the internet would continue to grow on IPv4 for the next 20 years, and the issue of IPv4 exhaustion would be deferred as a future concern. Despite efforts made to conserve IPv4 space, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) announced in 2011 that the world had officially run out of IPv4 addresses.