New Year has just started but one of the Predictions made about 2010 is poised to be proven wrong.

IPv4 Addresses will not get exhausted in 2010 as IANA(Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) had once predicted. But this should not relax network managers & machines vendors. American Registry for Internet Names (ARIN) is advocating that vendors start making the move to IPv6 now. The transition of the Internet to IPv6 is the only practical and readily available long-term solution to IPv4 address exhaustion.

IANA explains below:

Currently there are two types of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses in active use: IP version 4 (IPv4) and IP version 6 (IPv6).

IPv4 was initially deployed on 1 January 1983 and is still the most commonly used version. IPv4 addresses are 32-bit numbers often expressed as 4 octets in “dotted decimal” notation (for example, 192.0.2.53). IPv4 provides 4.3 billion IP addresses .ie 2^32 addresses.

IPv6 Deployment of the IPv6 protocol began in 1999. IPv6 addresses are 128-bit numbers and are conventionally expressed using hexadecimal strings (for example, 2001:0db8:582:ae33::29). IPv6 provides very large magnitude of addresses. The number of addresses IPv6 could support can be expressed as: 34 x 10 to the 38th power, or 340 trillion trillion trillion.

Doug Junkins, Vice President of IP development says:-

Maybe next year when we’re another year closer to having IPv4 address space exhausted we’ll see more of an emphasis on the U.S. consumer electronics, but I don’t think we’re there quite yet.

Resources : IANA.org, Google News, networking.webopedia.com

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