While most people may be familiar with the term IP address, fewer people have a full understanding of how IP addresses work. In order to locate and identify communications on an Internet Protocol (IP) network, all computers, routers and network printers are assigned an IP address. When the internet was created, there was a finite number of IPv4 addresses available (4.3 billion). As the internet gained popularity, it was only a matter of time until these IPv4 addresses would eventually run out.
On this day, February 3rd, in 2011, the last five remaining IPv4 address blocks were distributed. The exhaustion of IPv4 addresses led to the beginning of the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) age. IPv6 has been in development as the IPv4’s successor for several years. IPv6 has the capability of supporting 2128 addresses, which is a drastic improvement over the 232 supported by IPv4.
The amount of users on Google with IPv6 was more than 5% for the first time in December 2014.