Why have we not run out of ip addresses?

Question

With the massive growth in internet devices, shouldn’t we have used up all possible ipv4 numbers?

In: Technology

Answer 1

1. We switched to ipv6 – this increased the number of ips from 2^32 to 2^128. A lot of infrastructure and network infrastructure switched immediately freeing up space for in ipv4 for other stuff.
2. We cheated. Routers became small devices to “lie” to the Internet and keep track of which device is making which connection while showing only one address to the web. Internal addresses start with 192.168 or 172.16.0.0-172.31. or 10. This is Network Address translation.
3. We Subnet more closely with CIDR and Variable length subnet masks to save addresses; we use network addresses as assignable in certain environments, Probably other cheating.