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Cloud giant AWS will start charging customers for public IPv4 addresses from next year, claiming it is forced to do this because of the increasing scarcity of these and to encourage the use of IPv6 instead.It is now four years since we officially ran out of IPv4 ranges to allocate, and since then, those wanting a new public IPv4 address have had to rely on address ranges being recovered, either from from organizations that close down or those that return addresses they no longer require as they migrate to IPv6.If Amazon's cloud division is to be believed, the difficulty in...

North America has officially run dry of new IPv4 addresses, the numbers that computers use to find each other on the internet.This means the region can allocate no more of the 32-bit network addresses to web hosting companies, cloud providers, organizations and individuals: they're all taken. The space is full, and it's being heralded as a key milestone in the internet's growth. In the past few minutes, ARIN – the non-profit that oversees the allocation of IP addresses in North America – confirmed the available pool of the 32-bit network addresses is totally depleted. Last night, the team estimated there...

The World IPv6 Launch is set for next week on June 6th. On that day, website operators around the world will switch on IPv6 connectivity and keep it on. The event is a follow up to World IPv6 Day in 2011 in which over 300 websites switched on IPv6 for the day to see what would happen. VeriSign takes dual track model VeriSign, operator of root DNS servers and the .com and .net registries, has a unique role to play when it comes to IPv6. VeriSign sees traffic coming in as DNS queries and as record updates for domains. While...

Early this morning, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) announced that it had been allocated two /8 address blocks from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA ). Those two blocks, 39/8 and 106/8, were the last unallocated blocks in the IANA free pool of IPv4 address available to Regional Internet Registries (RIR). With the allocation, the final days of IPv4 have moved closer as the number of available addresses that can be allocated will dwindle. "Please be aware, this will be the final allocation made by IANA under the current framework and will trigger the final distribution of five...

Although IPv6 adoption seems to be moving at a snail’s pace, there’s no outrunning it. Brien Posey demystifies some of the addressing issues many admins are still trying to figure out. [Editor's note: This article has been revised to correct a couple of errors noted by TechRepublic members. Thanks to everyone who contributed their input.]Over the last several years, IPv6 has been inching toward becoming a mainstream technology. Yet many IT pros still don’t know where to begin when it comes to IPv6 adoption because IPv6 is so different from IPv4. In this article, I’ll share 10 pointers that will...

I've written previously that as we make the slow - and long overdue - transition from IPv4 to IPv6, we will soon be stuck with an awkward interim period in which the only new globally routable addresses we can get are IPv6, but most public content we want to reach is still IPv4. Large Scale NAT (LSN, also known as Carrier Grade NAT or CGN) is  an essential tool for stretching a service provider's public IPv4 address space during this transitional period. I've yet to work an IPv6 project involving LSN in which someone does not eventually, with great hope...

How will we know when IPv4 address space is all used up? And what will happen when that day comes? The modern Internet has been built using IPv4 (define), which provides for 4.3 billion address, a supply that could run dry within the next two years. Organizations that allocate IP address space like the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) have attempted to forecast when IPv4 address space will be gone, but it's not an exact science, and there is no precise date to mark on a calendar. At the ARIN XXV policy meetings held here this week, ARIN CIO...

The new year has barely started, but it's already become apparent that at least one dire prediction about 2010 isn't going to come to pass. IPv4 address space will not be exhausted in 2010 as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) had once forecast. But that doesn't mean that network managers or even consumer electronics vendors should sit on the sidelines. This week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the American Registry for Internet Names (ARIN) is advocating that vendors start making the move to IPv6 now. IPv4 technology uses a 32-bit address space providing capacity for 4.3...

The world is about to run out of the internet addresses that allow computers to identify each other and communicate, the man who invented the system has told The Times. Vint Cerf, the “father of the internet” and one of the world’s leading computer scientists, said that businesses and consumers needed to act now to switch to the next generation of net addresses. Unless preparations were made now, he said, some computers might not be able to go online and the connectivity of the internet might be damaged.

The coming shortage of Internet Protocol addresses on Monday prompted the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) to call for a faster migration to the new Internet Protocol, IPv6. ADVERTISEMENT The current version of the Internet Protocol, IPv4, allows for over 4 billion (2^32) Internet addresses. Only 19% of the IPv4 address space remains. Somewhere around 2012-2013, the last Internet address bloc will be assigned and the Internet will be full, in a manner of speaking. "We must prepare for IPv4's depletion, and ARIN's resolution to encourage that migration to IPv6 may be the impetus for more organizations to start...

The growing popularity of smartphones, IPTV and other gadgets connecting to the Internet is eating up real estate on the net, and soon techies can expect cyberspace to run out of room, according to a Frost & Sullivan analyst briefing Thursday. Experts say today's Internet protocol version 4 (IPv6) also limits services of multimedia content and data communication, including mobile IP, P2P and video calls. With new mobile IPv6, telecommunication providers can easily roll out custom services from movies to ring tones to television. By 2012 about 17 billion devices will connect to the Internet, estimates Research firm IDC Corp....

China, Korea and Japan are running out of time. Governments and academics from the three countries are teaming up, putting aside troubled histories to avert a common disaster. The issue: Asia's well of available IP (Internet Protocol) addresses is running dry rapidly. Without an IP address--a 32-bit string of numbers--a 3G phone, PC or handheld has no identity and cannot send or receive data. When that final address is used up in a couple of years, the online world will grind to a halt. And perhaps, so will the economies of the three North Asian nations. The shrinking pool Asia's...