IPv4 addresses are not available in Europe

The end of IPv4

For many years it has been predicted that there would come a time when there would be no free IPv4 addresses available. That time is here. The RIPE NCC has announced a state of complete exhaustion of IPv4 addresses and has no more addresses to allocate from. This means that there is nowhere left to take from and new applicants for IPv4 addresses cannot be satisfied. At the moment, however, most providers in Europe still have a certain number of addresses in stock, but in the future it is expected that it will become increasingly difficult to obtain new addresses in the old address space. In addition, providers may lose some unused addresses as part of cost-saving measures.

What is RIPE NCC?

Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (hereafter RIPE NCC) is an international independent, non-profit membership organisation that supports the infrastructure of the Internet through technical coordination in the regions it serves. The most important activity of the RIPE NCC is to act as a Regional Internet Registry providing global Internet resources and related services (IPv4, IPv6) to members in the RIPE NCC region.

Addressing

Each device connected to the Internet must have its own address. However, this is not always a unique, public IPv4 address. In that case, with the number of computers and mobile phones, we would have exhausted the entire registry long ago. That is why the vast majority of ISPs assign a non-public IP address to their clients, which does not cause any restrictions for normal internet activities. However, there are some drawbacks - if you would like to make your home network available to the Internet and connect to it from anywhere, you will run into a problem. The principle of a non-public IP address is that it is virtually invisible on the Internet, as it can be repeated on different networks. Thus, only the IP of the provider's main router is visible from the Internet.

Hope for new companies

RIPE has already set up a waiting list for those wishing to allocate new addresses. These will only be answered if the organization gets any back. However, this situation will only arise if an operator or company goes out of business and returns its own allocations. In such cases, however, it may also happen that someone else buys them from the ending company. RIPE will only allocate returned IPv4 in small quantities to companies that have not yet received addresses.

Access to IPv6?

The total number of possible IPv4 addresses is 2^32, that's just over four billion. The newer IPv6 standard, which was created in 1998, already works with 128-bit addresses, which total 3.4^10^38. That's an absolutely unimaginable number to humans. IPv6 contains a 64-bit network prefix and a 64-bit guest part. The guest portion is either automatically generated based on the MAC address of the interface, or it can be manually assigned.

A slight complication for ISPs may be that IPv6 is not yet sufficiently widespread. Most of the Internet still runs primarily on IPv4 networks. Over the past year, global IPv6 penetration among Google users was around 25%, but in the Czech Republic it is only about 12%.

 

In order for the Internet to move into a new era of IPv6, network operators, servers and users will need to support it. Users themselves are the most prepared for now, as today's hardware and operating systems can handle IPv6.