Yesterday the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) issued it’s last free IPv4 address – exhausting the pool of available IPv4 IP addresses. So what does this mean for the average internet user? Apart from the fact that IPv4 addresses are going to be ridiculously hard to come by now – the exhaustion of their pool puts into effect a few significant changes – however most of these apply to your hosting and internet providers really. There are no longer any limits on how often an organization may request an address block transfer and any future address spaces that get assigned to ARIN will be used to satisfy requests within the Waiting List first, and any remaining address blocks will get added back to the free pool.
However considering that the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority ran out of IPv4 address blocks back in 2011 – I don’t expect ARIN to be adding any address blocks to the free pool.
The average internet user won’t really feel anything from all of this, and most webmasters are already with a hosting company that supports IPv6. IT staff however will definitely have the pressure put on them to ensure the networks they are managing fully support IPv6 addresses. Furthermore webmasters and developers should expect to see more widespread support for IPv6 (here’s pointing directly at you Amazon CloudFront) from hosting and internet providers.
Are you on a network that already supports IPv6? Don’t know? Use this simple online tool to test if your browser and internet provider support IPv6.