We're running out of IPV4 blocks! PC Pro reports that there are only 7 IPV4 blocks left in the global pool, after two of the remaining 9 were allocated. Of those remaining 7, 5 are already reserved.

So What's an IPV4 block anyway and why should anyone outside the realm of geekdom care?

IPV4 - or Internet Protocol version 4 was designed to allow internet traffic to be routed across different networks - before IPv4, all internet traffic was sent to all nodes on a network which meant as a network grows, the speed of communication slows down accordingly. It allowed the world wide web to be developed. IPV4 uses 32bit (four byte) addresses. These IP addresses look like 4 numbers ranging between 0 and 256 with dots between them ( there are other ways of writing IP addresses but the dot notation is the most commonly referred to). A typical IP address might look like 25.220.112.0 These addresses are allocated to different ISP's and Organisations in blocks. Some organisations have large blocks, for example, any IP address starting with 9. is owned by IBM, any address starting with 25. is owned by the Ministry of Defence. Every device that connects directly to the internet has a unique IP address. The maximum number of possible IP addresses is 4,294,967,296 (2 ³²). When the protocol was first devised, it was unimaginable that 4 billion people would each own a computer. However, in the last few years, we've seen many non computers have IP addresses. Mobile phones mostly have IP addresses, Internet Television, Smart Fridges, Network attached printers, cable modems, etc. So the number of available IP addresses has dried up to the point where we are likely to run out next year. Internal networks use their own IP translation (caled Network Address Translation) which means that if you have a few devices that connect to a wifi router, they will each have an internal ip address and therefore any traffic from these devices to the internet have the IP address of the router. This has delayed the inevitable problem of address space exhaustion.

Don't Panic

The successor to IPv4 is IPv6 (yeah, I don't know what happened to IPv5 either). Instead of using 4 numbers for the address, IPv6 uses 6 numbers. This means that instead of a maximum of 4 billion possible addresses, you can have about 3.4×10³⁸ possible addresses