Broadband Advisor

There are currently 39 remaining /8 allocations, which contain some 16,777,214 addresses, five of which will likely be reserved for policy. If consumption rates continue, some experts suggest there will be 19 allocations available next year, and three in 2010.

Addresses available under Ipv4 will expire on 18 February 2011, at 7:45AM, according to mathematical extrapolation. The last address will be sold earlier, Biber said, because businesses are moving online faster than ever, while technology such as Network Address Translation (NAT) is allowing organisations to milk the most from available addresses.

While Biber said the expiration of IPv4 will be less cataclysmic than some industry members suggest, reliance on work-around technology such as NAT is unsustainable.

“Money is better spent on getting IPv6 out there than on trying to keep [IPv4] alive,” he said.

Biber said network provider Comcast switched to IPv6 to support its 70 million set top boxes, which each hold 2.5 IP addresses, after the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority could not allocate space under Ipv4.

The Australian government are transitioning all service departments including defence to IPv6 by about 2015, while many local network providers already support the new platform.