Alarms Bells Sounding for IPv4 Addresses … Perhaps Time for IPv6?

Alarms Bells Sounding for IPv4 Addresses … Perhaps Time for IPv6?

The Internet has been more successful than we could ever have imagined, and when it was created, those designing IP and TCP could never have imagined that billions of computers would connect to the Internet every single day. And, so, for IP, a 32-bit address was standardized at IPv4. A few years ago, we actually ran out of IPv4 addresses, and there is now a limited pool of addresses. While IPv6 — with a 128-bit address — as meant to overcome the limited addressing space for IPv4, it has never quite taken off.

If you are interested, the number of possible IPv4 address is 4,294,967,296, but with IPv6 we get: 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 possible addresses.

Now, the signs of the increasing expense for IPv4 addresses are being shown with AWS increasing its costs for public IPv4 addresses on 1 Feb 2024. In fact, an IP address will cost $0.005 per IP per hour for all the allocated addresses — whether they are attached to an instance or not. The cost will thus be £3.71 per month for a single IP address — and around $44 per year. Along with this, the AWS Cost Calculator will include costs for a public IP address.

Perhaps now, the industry will properly move toward IPv6, as we cannot continue to scale the Internet without a proper migration away from IPv4. Another method which can mitigate the costs of increasing IPv4 address costs is to use load balancing, and where a number of servers can be mapped onto a single IP address.

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