Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the “new” Internet addressing protocol created by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the exhaustion of the current IPv4 address space. What does that mean to you and I? Ultimately, it means very little. The transition from IPv4 to IPv6 has been going on, very slowly, for the last 13 years. However, something rather significant occurred on February 1, 2011, the last IPv4 blocks were allocated from IANA to the Regional Internet Registries (RIR) around the world. That means there are no more Internet Protocol version 4 addresses left to allocate to those authorities. So, when they’ve been allocated out, they’re gone forever.

This badge will track the total available IPv4 addresses at each registry: