Yesterday, on September 24, the last addresses from the free IPv4 pool were allocated in North America. It was officially announced by ARIN non-profit (American Registry for Internet Numbers), responsible for the allocation of IP addresses in this region. It has been known about the exhaustion of IPv4 pool, limited by 4294967296 network addresses, for a long time, and another regions will also face with the same problem in the nearest future, as North America did. "When we designed the Internet 40 years ago, we did some calculations and estimated that 4.3 billion terminations ought to be enough for an experiment, - said Vint Cerf, the programmer and mathematician, who is often dubbed the father of the internet . – Well, the experiment escaped the lab."
Now, persons, who are interested in receiving an IP address in North America, have to join the queue, expecting IANA to find an opportunity to give the region an additional pool of addresses, which can be formed from the addresses other users earlier refused. There is also an option of purchasing the IP addresses on a commercial basis. The alternative decision is a transition to the new IPv6 protocol version, which address resources seem to be almost boundless today (as, however, the IPv4 ones 40 years ago). But the adaptation of IPv6 is still going quite slowly because of technical and organizational difficulties which transition often face with.
