Did you know that we are running out of IP addresses? The internet is growing constantly and due to a major economy and internet boom in China and India we will soon be running out of IPv4 addresses, IPv6 addresses will be the new standard. The countdown to IPv4 exhaustion is ticking!
IPv4 vs. IPv6
IPv4 is using 32-bit addresses, so overall there can only be 2^32 addresses. Of course 4,294,967,296 (32^2) is a large amount of addresses, but considering that for example the amount of internet users in China is growing by 6% every year, experts have been worried about IPv4 exhaustion since the 80’s. IPv6 will be using 128-bit addresses and will therefore have a much larger address space.
Internet Users USA vs. China
The USA had about 227,719,000 internet users (75% of the population) in 2009, according to internetworldstats.com. The internet users in China increased from 137,000,000 in 2007 to more than 360,000,000 in 2009 (cnnic.cn).
IPv4 Countdown Widget
HE (Hurricaine Electrics) have released a widget for the geeks out there who want to put a exhaustion countdow widget on their desktop or on their websites. They even released a widget for your iPhone and plenty of other widgets:
- iPhone / iPod Touch App
- Android Application
- Webpage Widget
- iGoogle Gadget
- Google Desktop Gadget
- Windows Vista / 7 Gadget
- Mac OS X Dashboard Widget
Amount of IPv6 domains
The transition to IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6) is slow but already 80% of all TLD’s (top level domains) support IPv6.
There are already more than 1,5 million IPv6 domains !
