IANA allocated the last five remaining /8 blocks of IPv4 addresses to the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) early last February. Those blocks will be running out of addresses soon. Let’s take a quick look at Hurricane Electric’s IPv4/IPv stats counter (as of 2011-04-21, at around 10:40AM, Philippine time) to see what’s left:
It looks like APNIC might be running out first, which is understandable as demand in Asia is quite high. That might happen within this year. ARIN already has most IPv4 addresses so perhaps it will make do with IPv4 for a while, but that’s being optimistic. My guess is that, for all practical purposes, the world will probably be out of new IPv4 addresses by 2012.
The bottom line, however, is that those numbers aren’t anywhere close to what will be needed to accommodate the new devices that will be needing IP addresses in the near future. The Second Internet (baxed on IPv6) is needed now.
