Total number of IP addresses in world: 4,294,967,296

Something that fascinates me about the internet v4 that nobody ever talks about ever - since it's fairly irrelevant so far - is that the ip4 addresses have long ago been allocated. New Zealand got 6,808,480 of them. Interesting!

The top-level exhaustion (I'm calling it an allocation) occurred on 31 January 2011. The regional level allocation exhaustions occurred for the Asia-Pacific on 15 April 2011, for Europe on 14 September 2012, and for Latin America and the Caribbean on 10 June 2014.

More interesting is that China only got China only got 333,593,588 whereas the US got 1,600,312,334 perhaps that can be explained by their use of a giant proxy server hiding all those souls?

So how are we doing? Face melting yet?

So the IP address space exhaustion came and went and nothing happened - a kind of shockwave marking the end of Internet version 4! Here are some of the highlights of the meltdown of IP4:

Core Router Meltdowns

Core Router Meltdown 512k routes

"When the BGP maps grow too large for their routers' memory then" , as the Internet Storm Center said, "BGP is flapping."

"Some routing tables hit 512K routes today. Some old hardware and software can't handle that and either crash or ignore newly learned routes. So this may cause some disturbances in the Force." - Teun Vink

Internet 2

Good thing the internet wizards have been deploying the new internet version 6 for the past 20 years or so already. God knows what the hell happened with Internet versions 1, 2, 3, and 5!

Turns out in the time between 2011 and 2015 the new internet got some help from Google! Google wasn't happy that NAT64 didn't work for Skype and Whatsapp etc. So they came up with 464XLAT which is gonna be called IP6 in the new Androids.

...and here comes IP6:

World IP6 graph 1 year

T Mobile US IP6 Deployment