The End is Nigh...

...Well for the address space known as IPv4. These are the addresses that most people are familiar with and take the format of four series of number between 0 and 256 with a dot (.) between.

On 31st January 2011 the 6th to last /8 block of addresses, which is about 16 million addresses, was handed out by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the people who look after the resources used to make the Internet work.

So what is significant about this?
Well that leaves just 5 /8 address blocks available in the world. This now invokes the final roll out procedure in which the last 5 blocks are handed out to each of the 5 regional registries (Who handle the allocation of addresses to ISPs and other corporations). This then signals the end of IPv4 address space.

When will the final 5 /8 address blocks be handed out?
They are due to be handed out at a ceremony on 4th February 2010. 

But that is 16m addresses per region. That should last ages?
With the rate of growth in devices attached to the Internet, from the iPhone to the web server you are viewing this page from, these addresses will have run out by the end of 2012, possibly early 2013 if we are careful.

So what now?
There will be some small blocks of IPv4 addresses that will be available to acquire from some companies but principally IPv4 will be a legacy. It won't vanish over night, it can't. There are too many things attached to it to make this change happen. Most home networks and many business networks have equipment such as print servers and firewalls that just won't handle anything other than IPv4. So first rule - Don't panic!

Of cause the Internet community have seen this issue coming so have a replacement live and in use already. This is called IPv6 and can be recognised by it's much longer string of 8 sets of 4 hexadecimal numbers (Hex is base 16, so 0, 1, 2 ... 9, a, b, c, d, e, f) separated by a colon (:). This gives the Internet billions of addresses. Enough for every man, woman and child alive today to have hundreds of addresses each.

Cool, where can I get some IPv6?
Right here! Trunk Networks has had IPv6 available for over a year now and with effect from 14th February 2011 all customers will have IPv6 address space allocated to them for free, ensuring that we can provide a seamless transition between IPv4 and IPv6. This applies to all hosted customers (Most of whom already have IPv6 addresses), leased line and ADSL customers. All our DNS, shared web servers, dedicated servers and mail servers have IPv6 addresses and are running native IPv6 as well as IPv4.

If you would like more information or would like your IPv6 address allocation sooner, pleasecontact us