Only 10% of IP addresses left unallocated!

90% of the IPv4 addresses in the world have already been used up.

IPv4 is an ancient Internet protocol which assigns an IP address to every device that needs to connect to the Internet. The way it’s structured allows for 4,294,967,296 addresses – not enough! With the majority of the current Internet traffic still operating on IPv4 and only 10% left (around 429 million), this means that anyone who is not yet connected might never be.

In a recent survey of 610 government, educational and general organizations across Europe, the Middle East and Asia, only 17% had upgraded to the new IPv6 protocol, catering for a much larger number of IP addresses.

Before you start running around in panic, the world has seen a 30% increase in IPv6 allocations in 2009 so there might be hope that governments, vendors, enterprises, telecoms operators and you get to switch before it’s too late!

Is this another Y2K scare? Could be, but didn’t Y2K end up being nothing because we all panicked?

If you’d like to sit down and watch the world tick its way to disconnection, IPv6 Now has a counter that currently reads 1067 days left.