Europe has already hit IP address limit

It has been known for a while now that the IPv4 way of things was getting old and that we were getting short on addresses – well Europe has almost reached that milestone.

These IPv4 addresses are now being “rationed” by the body that started the process years ago. Now companies can only apply once more for these addresses, and even then they will only receive 1,024 of them.

For those who don’t know what this is I’ll give a short explanation. Every device that connects to the internet is given a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address. Back in the 1970′s, the 3.6 billion IP addresses that IPv4 would give was thought to be enough. However, due to the rapid growth and popularity of the internet, that lot of addresses is quickly being dried up.

As we are running out of IPv4 addresses (there are only about 16 million of them left), companies will have to move to the new standard, IPv6. In fact, many of them started doing so months ago. Don’t worry though, this shouldn’t affect you as an end-user.

Source : BBC