DSL and Networks Information

IPv4 uses 32-bit (4-byte) addresses, which limits the address space to 4,294,967,296 (232) possible unique addresses. However, some are reserved for special purposes such as private networks (~18 million addresses) or multicast addresses (~16 million addresses). This reduces the number of addresses that can be allocated as public Internet addresses. As the number of addresses available are consumed, an IPv4 address shortage appears to be inevitable, however Network Address Translation (NAT) has significantly delayed this inevitability.

This limitation has helped stimulate the push towards IPv6, which is currently in the early stages of deployment and is currently the only contender to replace IPv4.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 4:45 pm and is filed under IPV4. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.