This news may not surprise you. After all, we’ve known for well over 30 years that we don’t have quite enough addresses on the Internet to go with. However, the problem is becoming more urgent: RIPE NCC, the organisation that manages IP addresses for Europe and large parts of Asia, is down to their last few millions of available IPv4 addresses and is expecting to run out altogether by the end of 2019.
So what happens after all addresses are gone? If you’re an Internet Service Provider in need of more address space, you’ll be put on the waiting list and if you’re lucky, you may be handed a smaller range of leftover addresses.
For the real solution to the problem, we need to look further back…