Asia-Pacific Runs Out of IPv4 Internet Addresses

The Asia-Pacific region effectively ran out of IPv4 addresses on Friday, meaning that the region is now conserving addresses for the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition.

The region officially moved into its planned “Phase Three” of the transition, where new and existing members will have restricted access to the existing IPv4 addresses used by most PCs today. All new and existing APNIC members will be entitled to a maximum delegation of a “/22”, or (1,024 addresses) of IPv4 space, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre said.

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APNIC is the first regional Internet registry to exhaust its IPv4 address space, which experts have warned about for some time. When the available IPv4 addresses are exhausted, new devices coming onto the network, from phones to network switches, must be assigned an IPv6 address unless some intermediary technology is used.

“Considering the ongoing demand for IP addresses, this date effectively represents IPv4 exhaustion for many of the current operators in the Asia Pacific region,” said Paul Wilson, director general of APNIC, in a statement. “From this day onwards, IPv6 is mandatory for building new Internet networks and services.”

Current IP addresses use the IPv4 format, which assigns users an IP address using four numbers, each from 1 to 256. (8.8.8.8 is an available DNS server IP address administered by Google, for example.) Addresses like pcmag.com are translated behind the scenes into their numeric equivalents, just like 800-DOMINOS equates to an actual phone number. Each new device that connects to the Internet is assigned a new IP address, although home networks can assign their own non-unique IPs via network address translation, or NAT.

While the IPv4-to IPv6 shift will be a worry for networking vendors, ISPs, and domain-name registrars, the transition shouldn’t be as much of a concern for ordinary consumers, networking vendors told PCMag.com. ISPs like Comcast can also run in dual-stack mode, internally translating addresses from IPv4 to IPv6.

“You can certainly run dual-stack in the routers to serve both types of packets,” said Vint Cerf, the so-called “father of the Internet” and a chief Internet evangelist for Google, in an interview earlier this year. “You can certainly run dual-stack at edge devices, if the device has been provided with both address types. The IPv4 address might be a NAT assignment using so-call ‘private IP address space.’

“Eventually there will be no more IPv4 ‘public address space,'” he continued. “When that exhaustion occurs (and it won’t happen in a uniform way—some places will run out before others), then there will be some devices that only have IPv6 assignments. They will not be able to directly interact with IPV4-only devices.”