US and Canada to run out of IPv4 addresses by the summer

The US and Canada are set to run out of internet addresses. According to estimates, North America would run out of IPv4 addresses (the familiar 1.2.3.4 format) this summer even as a number of businesses might stall this by giving up the IPv4 numbers they no longer use.

However, many others would have no option but to switch to IPv6 (hexadecimals) if they want to add new addresses on their networks. Since the newer standard is in widespread use, there should be no need to worry about an imminent meltdown.

Facebook would not even be functioning unless it had already migrated a lot of servers to IPv6, for instance.

However smaller businesses would be faced with some tough problems though. Compatible networking hardware was needed to run on IPv6, and that could get expensive to replace if one had been holding on to IPv4 for as long as possible.

According to Gartner Research, it would cost the average firm 7 per cent of its annual IT budget to make the move to the newer version.

However, those who could not make that jump would have to buy legacy addresses from someone else and these would not come cheap when the older addresses were getting scarce.

According to the American Registry for Internet Numbers, it has around 3.4 million available addresses left – which sounded like a lot, considering the current uptake the supply could run out this summer.

Internet Protocol addresses are numerical codes that are critical for data moving from place to place. With the expansion of the ARPANET, the precursor to today's internet, in 1981, engineers established 4.3 billion addresses, thinking that would be enough.

The Wall Street Journal reported big tech firms were busy stockpiling addresses for future expansion in the cloud – including Salesforce, which last year bought over 262,000 addresses, and Microsoft, which bought 666,000 in 2011.