Global IPv4 addresses are officially exhausted. VPS may not be so easy to buy in the future

The reality that the world is running out of IPv4 addresses has been publicized for years, but the day has finally arrived. In fact, researchers have foreseen such a future as early as the 1980s, and in 2012 we ushered in the exhaustion of top IPv4 addresses. Today, regional inventories of IPv4 addresses are also depleted.

The news was announced in an email (posted by Nikolas Pediaditis) that read:

Dear colleagues,

Today, at 15:35 UTC + 1, 25 November 2019, we made the final /22 IPv4 allocation from the last remaining addresses in the available pool. Now, we have run out of IPv4 addresses.

Our announcement comes as no surprise to network operators – the RIPE community had long anticipated and planned for IPv4 exhaustion. In fact, it is because of the community's responsible management of these resources that we have been able to provide /22 allocations to thousands of new networks in our service area since reaching the last /8 in 2012.

In theory, running out of IPv4 addresses should mean that no new IPv4 devices can be added to the Internet, but in practice, many factors mitigate.

The first is that ISPs can reuse and recycle unused IPv4 addresses. The second reason is that the same IP address can be used privately behind the ISP router due to NAT (Network Address Translation). Finally, of course, is the transition to IPv6, which should now be in good order, allowing direct peer-to-peer connections over the Internet, which has a huge address space of 3.4×10^38.

Running out of time retroactively

On April 15, 2011, Asia Pacific (APNIC) allocated the last IPv4 block for Europe, Middle East, and Central Asia (RIPE NCC) on September 14, 2012.

Latin America and the Caribbean (LACNIC) allocated the last IPv4 block on June 10, 2014.

September 24, 2015 for North America, until today, the European RIPE (World Internet Organization) NCC finally ran out of storage.

IPv4 addresses are finally running out, and VPS prices are expected to increase until IPv6 becomes popular.

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