With the massive growth in internet devices, shouldn’t we have used up all possible ipv4 numbers?
In: Technology
TLDR: Workarounds like NAT and smaller IP allocations allowed us to kick the problem down the curb, and now we have IPv6 which has solved the problem for the long term.
We did, but we also didn’t.
IP addresses are allocated to organizations in blocks (think street names) and it’s up to them to decide how to use them. All the blocks have been allocated, but not all the individual IP addresses have been used.
Part of the problem is early over-allocation and greediness. In the early days of the internet IPs were handed out like candy. Companies like Apple, AT&T, and Ford got in early on the allocation and have /8’s permanently assigned to them or 16,777,216 IP addresses each. Which is more than they can ever use, but they refuse to give them up.
The US military alone has 13 /8’s assigned to it or 218,103,808 IPs.
Just because these organizations have tons of IPs doesn’t mean they actually use them.
Also we’ve put in work arounds like NAT. NAT works like an apartment block where you can assign 1 address to the whole building despite the building have 200 apartments in it. This cheat is what allowed the internet to continue to grow in the 00’s and most of the 10’s without slowing down.
We also changed the rules, once we realized we needed way more IPs than originally thought the allocation rules were changed to distribute smaller blocks to organizations so that it would be more efficient.
Lastly we have implemented IPv6 now that has 2^128 possible IPs or 340 trillion. Most home users and businesses still use the traditional IPv4 but the cellphone infrastructure runs mostly on v6.
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