IP Addresses Through 2025

Summary

The ISP Column A column on things Internet Other Formats: IP Addresses through 2025 January 2026 Geoff Huston It's time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let’s see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself. Back around 1992, the IETF gazed into their crystal ball and tried to understand how the Internet was going to evolve and what demands that would place on the addressing system as part of the “IP Next Generation” study. The staggeringly large numbers of connected devices that we see today were certainly within the range predicted by that study. The assumption made at the time was that we would continue to use much the same IP protocol architecture, including the requirement that each connected device was assigned a unique IP address, and the implication was that the 32-bit address field defined in version 4 of the IP protocol was clearly going to be inadequate to cope with the predicted number of connected devices. A span of 4 billion address values was just not large enough. We concluded at the time that the only way we could make the Internet work across such a massive pool of connected devices was to deploy a new IP protocol that came with a massively larger address space. It was from this reasoning that IPv6 was designed, as this world of abundant silicon processors connected to a single public Internet was the scenario that IPv6 was primarily intended to solve. The copious volumes of a 128-bit address space were intended to allow us to uniquely assign a public IPv6 address to every such device, no matter how small, or in whatever volume they might be deployed. But while the Internet has grown at amazing speeds across the ensuing 33 years, the deployment of IPv6 has proceeded at a more measured pace. There is still no evidence of any common sense of urgency about the deployment of IPv6 in the public Inte...