IP addresses through 2025

Summary

It’s time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let’s examine the changes that have occurred in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and consider what IP address allocation information can reveal about the evolving nature of the network itself. Around 1992, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) conducted the ‘IP Next Generation’ study (RFC 1752) to understand the demands that would be placed on the addressing system. The staggeringly large numbers of connected devices that we see today were certainly within the range predicted by that study. The assumption made at the time was that we would continue to use much the same IP protocol architecture, including that each connected device would be assigned a unique IP address. This implied that the 32-bit address field defined in version four of the IP protocol was clearly going to be inadequate to cope with the predicted number of connected devices. A span of 4B address values was just not large enough. At the time, it was concluded that the only way the Internet would work across such a massive pool of connected devices was to deploy a new IP protocol that came with a massively larger address space. This world of abundant silicon processors connected to a single public Internet was the scenario that IPv6 was primarily intended to solve. The size of the 128-bit address space would allow us to uniquely assign a public IPv6 address to every such device, no matter how small, or how many But while the Internet has grown at amazing speeds across the ensuing 33 years, the deployment of IPv6 has proceeded at a more measured pace. There’s still no evidence of any common sense of urgency about the deployment of IPv6 in the public Internet, and there is still no common agreement that the continued reliance on IPv4 is failing us. There’s a contradiction between the addressed device population of the IPv4 Internet and the actual count of connected devices, which is, of course, many times larger. Thr...