# What happens when there are no more ipv4 addresses left?



## hxQ&S8ZaVn9e (Sep 3, 2015)

My ISP does not have compatibility with ipv6 and they do not have plans to make it work when I asked. Does this mean that people will not be able to host more websites in a couple years or that the cost will increase a lot so they can be accessed over ipv4?


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## coreyman (Sep 3, 2015)

> My ISP does not have compatibility with ipv6 and they do not have plans to make it work when I asked. Does this mean that people will not be able to host more websites in a couple years or that the cost will increase a lot so they can be accessed over ipv4?



Get a new ISP if possible.


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## MikeA (Sep 3, 2015)

> My ISP does not have compatibility with ipv6 and they do not have plans to make it work when I asked. Does this mean that people will not be able to host more websites in a couple years or that the cost will increase a lot so they can be accessed over ipv4?



What ISP is it? Most of the U.S. providers have plans for IPv6 in the near future, unless it's a very small provider for a single city. I use Charter right now and they don't have IPv6 for residential, only business customers, but that'll change soon.


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## telephone (Sep 3, 2015)

hxQ&S8ZaVn9e said:


> My ISP does not have compatibility with ipv6 and they do not have plans to make it work when I asked. Does this mean that people will not be able to host more websites in a couple years or that the cost will increase a lot so they can be accessed over ipv4?



I'll take the pesimistic view here:

ISPs are in no danger. If they wish to procrastinate, they could do so for another 10+ years. If they're running low on IPs, they can simply NAT per exchange (X IPs per 100 people).


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## AuroraZero (Sep 3, 2015)

People will riot and cause fires, flip over cars and bomb the stores. They will have no way to get their porn and it will cause them to go go crazy. Amazingly though some how the cat pictures will continue to get posted.


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## wlanboy (Sep 3, 2015)

The big corps do have a lot of unused ipv4 ips left.


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## rmlhhd (Sep 4, 2015)

The real IPv4 exhaustion (0 IPs left) will likely be a good few years away if it even happens. Plenty of organisations have unused IP Space which can be sold on or redistributed. AfraNIC for instance still has 42520320 addresses free (/8 x 2.53) and IANA still has ~15 /8's set for future use.


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## drmike (Sep 4, 2015)

Possible we'll go to a split web.  It's not a terrible idea per se....  Just corporations never have good intentions... soooo....

What is going to happen with IPv4 and end customers?   That's an interesting situation.

Customers can expect to pay more for IP commodity in the near future.   That 20 cent IP value might become $1, per month.  Those are hosting prices, for services in a datacenter.

As a home customer, your IP is already probably abusing you for a static IP and long has.   For instance one of the popular US cable companies charges over $20 per month per static IP.  Will that increase?  No, it's already offensive.

Nothing stopping you from gluing together a work around, tunneling things, using an IPv6 tunnel broker for free IPv6, etc.


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## Maestro (Sep 4, 2015)

I dount that there will be ip exhaustion any time soon. There are many ip's that are unused and can be sold or leased for use.

I know my isp uses ipv6 and ipv4


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## HBAndrei (Sep 4, 2015)

It'll be an interesting time to live in when the day finally comes and we run out of IPv4.

Until then IPv4 prices will continue to rise more and more, as demand is constantly growing while supply is constantly dropping.


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## Gary (Sep 4, 2015)

If a consumer ISP runs out of IPv4 and for some reason can't do IPv6, they'll NAT everyone/new customers and if you need a dedicated IPv4 you'll pay a premium for it.

If the internet runs out of IPv4 and sites start becoming IPv6-only, people will just have to use tunnels to access the v6 web.


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## wlanboy (Sep 4, 2015)

Look at those /8 IPv6 nets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks
e.g.: "19.0.0.0/8 Ford Motor Company" 16 million ips...

It may happen that all are assigned - but they are not used.


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## MannDude (Sep 4, 2015)

> Look at those /8 IPv6 nets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks
> e.g.: "19.0.0.0/8 Ford Motor Company" 16 million ips...
> 
> It may happen that all are assigned - but they are not used.



Yep. Ideally companies like that would be encouraged to re-introduce unused space back in a manner where they could be used if actually needed.


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## drmike (Sep 4, 2015)

Problem is stuff like Ford I'll bet is legacy.  ARIN has no lordship over.

ARIN was offering some reduced rates for your annual fee for givebacks... But such doesn't apply to legacy space.

No one with any sanity is handing ARIN anything back.


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## MannDude (Sep 4, 2015)

That is why I said _encouraged_ and not forced. But encouragement can come from anyone really, but they have no obligation to sell or release any of those IPs from what I understand.


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## Amfy (Sep 5, 2015)

It's not only about hoping that Ford and others give back their /8, it's also about the global routing table is growing a lot. Many of you may remember the 512k day... in a few years we will hit 1M, then the issues will be even bigger.

What I want to say is, that the amount of addresses isn't the only reason to have IPv6 hopefully taking over at some point...


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## Coastercraze (Sep 5, 2015)

wlanboy said:


> Look at those /8 IPv6 nets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks
> e.g.: "19.0.0.0/8 Ford Motor Company" 16 million ips...
> 
> It may happen that all are assigned - but they are not used.



Not sure about Ford directly, but a lot of the older car plants have legacy equipment that isn't exactly capable of using IPv6. To redo an entire line would be expensive and not to mention would take time for each and every plant that would need it.


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## telephone (Sep 5, 2015)

Coastercraze said:


> wlanboy said:
> 
> 
> > Look at those /8 IPv6 nets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks
> ...


@wlanboy put a *6* instead of a *4*. Legacy configurations/equipment do *not* need IPV6, they can change their software to use 10.0.0.0/8 instead of legacy ranges.

If I owned a legacy block, there's no way I'd hand it back considering 2/3 of the IPs would probably go to hoarders.


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## HostPuma (Sep 6, 2015)

This reminded me when people wondered what will happen to all computers when the year 2000 arrives


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## qps (Sep 7, 2015)

wlanboy said:


> Look at those /8 IPv6 nets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks
> e.g.: "19.0.0.0/8 Ford Motor Company" 16 million ips...
> 
> It may happen that all are assigned - but they are not used.



Ford actually uses their IP space internally (as do most big companies).  Just because they do not announce it publicly does not mean it is not in use.  They could likely replace it all with RFC 1918 if they wanted, but that could cause conflicts with suppliers who also use RFC 1918 space.


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## Hxxx (Sep 7, 2015)

What will happen? ColoCrossing millions will duplicate ... >.>


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## Coastercraze (Sep 9, 2015)

telephone said:


> Coastercraze said:
> 
> 
> > wlanboy said:
> ...


Which would still require a redo of the line. To put into perspective how big a line is, it takes approximately 16 hrs for a car to reach the end of the line and be driven off the line.

I wouldn't want to hand it back either.


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## qps (Sep 9, 2015)

Coastercraze said:


> telephone said:
> 
> 
> > Coastercraze said:
> ...


It's also more than just the manufacturing equipment.  Every computer, printer/scanner/copier, phone, server, firewall, router, etc. has at least one of these addresses.

Unless there is a significant financial incentive for them to renumber, they aren't going to do it.  And even if there is a significant financial incentive, they would probably want to incorporate it into an already planned future upgrade cycle so it doesn't disrupt business activity, which would likely delay action since most of these companies only upgrade every 3 to 7 years.  I'm not sure the current IPv4 values on the secondary market for larger blocks are going to encourage much activity.  If values go up a bit more, it could start to get interesting for some of these companies.


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## astutiumRob (Sep 9, 2015)

hxQ&S8ZaVn9e said:


> Does this mean that people will not be able to host more websites in a couple years or that the cost will increase a lot so they can be accessed over ipv4?



Multiple sites can (for over 10 years now!) share the same IPv4 address, so the 'hosting' side of things isn't really going to be an issue - hostees will always be able to find a provider.

What will start to cause problems is when services/sites/systems _choose_ to only deliver their content over IPv6, which could preclude those connecting with v4 only to "miss out"


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## wlanboy (Sep 10, 2015)

astutiumRob said:


> Multiple sites can (for over 10 years now!) share the same IPv4 address, so the 'hosting' side of things isn't really going to be an issue - hostees will always be able to find a provider.
> 
> What will start to cause problems is when services/sites/systems _choose_ to only deliver their content over IPv6, which could preclude those connecting with v4 only to "miss out"


Services will be behind nat/proxies. I don't believe that a database or a worker does need an ipv4 address.
There are enough service bus technologies out there to connect different services. You have  64k ports so that is enough - even for versioning.
What I see is that more and more sites are simple static html using js to do the communication with the backend.
Add Cloudflare (and similar services) into the mix which do ipv4/ipv6 tunneling and you do not need a single ipv4 address.


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## VpsAG (Sep 15, 2015)

I do hope that we can migrate to ipv6 and let ipv4 as a remnant of the past. I am sure that they will still be here for at least 20 years, until all devices that work only on ipv4 will be morally surpassed. Let's hope that they do not have an infinite shelf life. As to answer your question, I do not think that any Y2K problem will arise from the depletion of ipv4 IPs.


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## HostPuma (Oct 1, 2015)

Well, it seems ARIN just ran out of IPv4 addresses:

https://www.arin.net/resources/request/ipv4_countdown.html


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## HN-Matt (Oct 1, 2015)

Now that they've run out, the question is how many IPv4 are actually _in use_ and how many are just dormant and going to waste in X's hoarding space?


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## Scudlayer (Oct 8, 2015)

All depends from the IPv4 price rising. When it becomes high enough to justify the efforts of migration for many isp (In some case, IPv4 are worth more than the VPS), the transition to IPv6 will be more rapid.


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## Albertwu (Oct 13, 2015)

IPV6 is coming. we don't have to worry about that.


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## GIANT_CRAB (Oct 13, 2015)

> IPV6 is coming. we don't have to worry about that.



IPv6 isn't coming, it ALREADY is here. The issue is that majority of the ISPs still refuse to implement IPv6 and are relying on carrier grade NAT w/o IPv6. Many of these ISPs also have lousy excuses such as not having IPv6 equipment and deployment being difficult. IPv6 was out long ago and planning for implementation should have been done long ago. Same goes for the actual implementation.

It just seems that being human, we don't see any urgency to important things until it is too late. IPv6 might be one of them, and maybe global warming too.


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## HN-Matt (Oct 13, 2015)

> > IPV6 is coming. we don't have to worry about that.
> 
> 
> 
> IPv6 isn't coming, it ALREADY is here. The issue is that majority of the ISPs still refuse to implement IPv6 and are relying on carrier grade NAT w/o IPv6. Many of these ISPs also have lousy excuses such as not having IPv6 equipment and deployment being difficult. IPv6 was out long ago and planning for implementation should have been done long ago. Same goes for the actual implementation.


It may also be that many don't know what to make of IPv6 superabundance. Might feel overwhelming to be on the receiving end of such large allocations, not to mention the new & confusing 128 bit formatting.



> It just seems that being human, we don't see any urgency to important things until it is too late. IPv6 might be one of them, and maybe global warming too.


Yeah, hopefully the way humans relate to fossil fuels doesn't end up manifesting analogously in the IPv4 market.


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## OnSebastian (Oct 18, 2015)

hxQ&S8ZaVn9e said:


> My ISP does not have compatibility with ipv6 and they do not have plans to make it work when I asked. Does this mean that people will not be able to host more websites in a couple years or that the cost will increase a lot so they can be accessed over ipv4?



I don't think anyone will have real problems hosting websites in near future. But just for you, I would recommend switching to a different ISP as every ISP should have IPv6 ready already or atleast plans to when it will be available.


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## Sonwebhost (Oct 18, 2015)

When ip4 run out we will go to providers and get more so it will be ip4, ip6 and ip8, and so on thanks


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## keanu (Oct 18, 2015)

ISP's are slowly implementing IPv6, at least mine did. Costs for IPv4 will go up, and switching to IPv6 will become cheaper.
Infrastructure is already there so we should see a slow movement towards IPv6 and the phasing out of IPv4.


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## brookesdjb (Feb 15, 2016)

You can use a provider like Hurricane Electric who offer free ip6 Tunnels. Follow the instructions on the site to set up a tunnel with your router/computer and it will tunnel ip6 over ip4, and allow you to use ip6 addresses on your local lan, and access ip6 sites on the web. I use a routerboard as my router, and Virgin Media my ISP doesn't support IP6 yet, so this works great for me. Its totally free and you can normally expect about 20Mb/s speed from it. Free account and instructions here: https://tunnelbroker.net


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## SkyNetHosting (Feb 19, 2016)

Hello.


IPV6 already supported by most ISP's and OS and control panels such as cPanel, so this is really not going to be a problem. Most budget DC's are now offering servers with just 1 IPV4 IP along with IPV^ IP's.


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## shapehost (Feb 23, 2016)

There is no such thing as running out of IPv4.


There is math that says we are going to run out or we are already doing that, but if you do better calculations you'll see that is not true. With the time, many providers will get to IPv6 technology and will leave millions of IPv4 behind.


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## layeronline (Mar 15, 2016)

I think they will start to use NAT.


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## 3v-manager (Apr 9, 2016)

I think, when the no more IPv4 address, it will develop IPv6. And then willn't shortage of addresses for a long time.


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## DedidamNET (Apr 23, 2016)

Looking forward when the world will adopt IPv6 on a wide scale. I feel that the prices that are charged now (speaking as a provider) are not really worth it.


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## Hostfolks (Apr 25, 2016)

ipv6 needs to kick on more, also there are some large ranges pretty much doing nothing or wrongly used. If companies like MicroSoft get audited you'd probably find they don't need 1000's of ipv4.


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## cristipuc (Apr 27, 2016)

This will not happen, because many will migrate to IPv6 in the future.


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## DomainBop (Jun 16, 2016)

> What happens when there are no more ipv4 addresses left?



Criminals try to cash in is one of the things that happened when IPv4 was depleted.


Related article on IPv4 depletion from today's edition of The Register



> *Crims set up fake companies to hoard and sell IPv4 addresses*
> 
> 
> IPv4 addresses are now so valuable that criminals are setting up shell companies so they can apply for addresses, then resell them to users desperate to grow their networks...
> ...



According to the article there has been a sharp increase in hijackings since IPs were depleted in September 2015:



> Nobile said ARIN detected about 50 such hijacking attempts between 2005 and 2015. Since announcing IPv4 depletion in September 2015 the organisation has detected about 25.



...speaking of hijacked IP space, here's a recent WHT thread


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## TheLinuxBug (Jun 16, 2016)

DomainBop said:


> ...speaking of hijacked IP space, here's a recent WHT thread



Glad to hear that ignorant fuckwit  Gotzman  got what was coming to him.  I knew that guy was a shyster after my dealings with him.  May his network burn to the ground for his continued amoral and unethical treatment of customers and abuse of IPs acquired at the pure inconvenience of  the customers which he acquired.  Possibly some of the best news I heard all day.


Cheers!


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## drmike (Jun 17, 2016)

TheLinuxBug said:


> Glad to hear that ignorant fuckwit  Gotzman  got what was coming to him.  I knew that guy was a shyster after my dealings with him.  May his network burn to the ground for his continued amoral and unethical treatment of customers and abuse of IPs acquired at the pure inconvenience of  the customers which he acquired.  Possibly some of the best news I heard all day.
> 
> 
> Cheers!



But Goatman denies it all and calls the negative speakers impotent. #THISISWHATHMATTERS


Too bad the Register didn't mention him and the Protraf folks by name.  Both dicked with UK entities in their theft.  Protraf fellow has UK holding company where they changed data info to on borrowed ranges.


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## WiredBlade (Jul 26, 2016)

IPv6 is used more and more often and it would be outrageous for an ISP to not support IPv6.


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## AndriusP (Aug 1, 2016)

IPv6 usage grows every year. In 2020 it will be around 50% of IPv6 usage and IPv4 IP addresses will be worthless.


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## Nogics Technologies (Sep 21, 2016)

Their is nothing to worry about. Over 70% ISP are now IPV6 friendly and left are planning to become. IPV6 is future of IP numbering system which will make the dream of every user having their public IPV6 number true.


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