Today the Number Resource Organization (NRO) which is made up of five regional internet provider registries announced in an event today held in Montevideo, Urguay that they had handed out the last of the available internet addressess.
Rod Beckstrom, CEO of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) said, “This is truly a major turning point in the on-going development of the Internet”. The ICANN is responsible for assigning internet address blocks. Rod said that the internet was well aware of the shortage and that there were no surprises in the process.
ICANN had decided that when the pool was depleted to five blocks, each regitry would get one block each which was given were assigned today. Each block comprises 16.8 million addresses.
The shortage of internet addressess increased once mobile internet kicked into the market with every device demanding an ip address. Now the new internet addressess will use the IPv6 system which is enough to support 340 trillion, trillion, trillion unique ip addresses. Luckily the switch is already being made while it might not reflect on your day-to-day devices yet.