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Think of five different everyday items you use on a daily basis, and I can guarantee that they all use the internet. A refrigerator, a bedside table lamp, a wireless mouse, and a television, they all belong to the rapidly expanding network of interconnected objects that are able to gather and exchange data in real-time using sensors that are inside of them. For all those objects to be able to do so, they all need an individual IP address. Because of the growing number of things in the world that requires an IP address, it’s no wonder that the availability of IPv4 addresses has been exhausted to the point where they’re almost all gone. To think that at the start of the world adapting to technological advancements, 4 billion IPv4 addresses were thought to be enough, and they’re almost all gone after some decades later. Thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT) which is rapidly expanding still, the depleted IPv4 is not much of a surprise. Transfer markets for IPv4 are heating up We can’t only blame the IoT for the scarcity of the IPv4 addresses, though it is the main reason, network, cloud, and mobile technologies are also the cause of its depletion. Due to this, people and businesses in the transfer markets are heating up. Sellers rush to the market and sell IPv4 addresses because of the great rates and buyers who desperately need those Ipv4 addresses buy them all up to elevate the success of their organizations. Brokers who are specialized in this market have popped up to moderate the exchange of the buyers and sellers. So much has changed in so few decades simply because of the gigantic boom in technology that exhausted 4 billion IP addresses. What will come next? The interconnectivity of today’s world cannot be assisted by the IPv4 system anymore, it’s simply not enough. And unfortunately, the alternative isn’t quite reliable as yet. IPv6 is the newest system that offers trillions of unique IP addresses; however, it isn’t backward compatible with IPv4, which is quite the problem if we ever want to switch to using it. IPv6 is the first solution to the IPv4 problem, and the ability to use it is being worked on at this moment. One thing is for sure though, the Internet of Things is still expanding, and this will push the need to transition to IPv6 even more.
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