With the massive growth in internet devices, shouldn’t we have used up all possible ipv4 numbers?
In: Technology
We have, essentially. There are five regional internet registries (RIRs) and in the last ten years they have all run out of new IPv4 addresses, most recently in November 2019 when the RIR for Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia used up their last one.
Some individual ISPs still have unused addresses, and both ISPs and RIRs can recycle old addresses that are no longer being used.
We did, sort of. We have way more devices than ipv4 addresses, but a lot of them are using the same address and hiding behind a local network. For most broadband setups, your entire WiFi network is only consuming one public IP and it’s using a whole bunch of local IPs behind your router.
This bought us some time. Ipv6 was invented to make sure this “never” happens again, it has a far (far far far) larger number of addresses.
Not every IP address is “unique”.
To the internet, all the devices in your house connected to your router is using 1 IP address provided by your internet company.
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