US "to run out of IP addresses next year"

The United States could run out of unique Internet addresses to assign to new devices by the end of next year, according to telecommunications officials.

Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) provides the dominant internet architecture and requires each device to have a unique identifying IP address, but the protocol only has space for 4.3 billion addresses.

The recent profusion of mobile devices like Research in Motion's BlackBerry and Apple's iPad, and the expansion of Internet services to more homes, have quickly depleted available addresses.

An upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol with more space, called IPv6, is already under way, but adoption in the US has lagged behind Europe, China and other countries, leaving Americans with a real shortage of addresses.

"We now face an exhaustion of IPv4 addresses," said Lawrence Strickling, administrator of the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration. "Fortunately, IPv6 will support 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses,"

The administrator urged businesses to deploy and integrate IPv6 as soon as possible, but the transition may not be easy. The switch could cost businesses a fortune, and the new technology might not work well with current systems.

In response to the problem, the US chief information officer has issued a directive requiring all US government agencies to upgrade many of their servers and services to IPv6 by the end of fiscal year 2012.

The memo also ordered them to upgrade internal applications that use Internet servers and make enterprise networks compatible with IPv6 by the end of fiscal year 2014.

An estimated 94.5 percent of the available IP addresses for IPv4 have already been used, and the remaining 5.5 percent are expected to be allocated by regional internet registries by next summer.

"We expect that there will be no addresses available in our registries to give to Internet service providers by the end of 2011," said John Curran, president and chief executive of the American Registry for Internet Numbers.

This article originally appeared at pcpro.co.uk