The Return of the IPv4 Shortage

Are we running out of IPv4 addresses? Larry Seltzer wonders if we are, or if it’s an urban legend (I’d call it an ‘urban myth’!) Larry notes there are many who predict IPv4 addresses will run out around 2009/2010 – not very far away when one has to start planning for these things. So what happens then?Larry quotes Geoff Huston, internet guru, who says one of the Regional Internet Registries “will receive a request to allocate an address and will not be able to because their pool will have run out.” Geoff, says Larry, runs a site that, based on new data each day, predicts the end of IPv4, and that when Larry wrote the article, “the IANA pool will exhaust on April 27, 2010. The RIRs will run out on February 14, 2011.”But this may change significantly if people start hoarding addresses.Larry goes on to quote ARIN’s recent statement to ensure there is no hoarding, but concludes he’d “feel a lot better about things if I saw some visible moves to IPv6 where it matters, like in Linksys routers and products like that. Of course, that would only be useful if ISPs pushed their users to adopt IPv6 too. But none of these things seem likely to happen while IPv4 addresses are still as plentiful as, for example, oil. Perhaps it would be better for the price to start going up sooner rather than later.”To read Larry’s article, see http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2168465,00.asp