The End of IPv4 is Nearly Here — Really

Abstract

Winston Churchill has been quoted often when some momentous world event occurs, but not often in the context of the Internet. But his 1942 observation that the tide of war shifting in Great Britain's favor marked "perhaps, the end of the beginning" could aptly describe the state of Internet addressing. By any empirical measure, 2011 signified the "end of the beginning" in the shift from IPv4 addressing to IPv6. On 3 February, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated the last five blocks of /8 addresses - with 16,777,216 addresses in each block - to each of the five regional Internet registries (RIRs).