The RIPE NCC announces IPv4 Addresses has run out

Yesterday, the Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) issued a press release on its official website saying that the final IPv4 address in the possession of the agency has been allocated. The European Network Information Center, headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, is mainly responsible for address allocation in all regions of Europe, Central Asia, and parts of Russia and West Asia. This time the address allocation is also completed in the true sense of global IPv4 address allocation. Since then, there is no free IPv4 address segment that can be allocated to network operators.

The exhaustion of IPv4 address allocation was already predicted by industry experts in the 1980s. The main purpose of publishing this message is to remind the global transition to IPv6 addresses, otherwise, no new IPv4 address allocation may cause network difficulties. Although operators can use NAT network translation and IPv4 addresses to cope with address exhaustion, these methods are not long-term solutions. To solve the address problem once and for all, it is still necessary to promote the development of IPv6, especially in the era of 5G networks, the rapid advancement of IPv6 addresses is even more important.