Every device that connects to the Internet needs an address. But those addresses are rapidly being depleted. As unlikely as that may seem, the system put in place in 1977 assumed that four billion separate addresses on the network would be more than sufficient.
The Internet’s enormous success and growth has seen those addresses rapidly taken up. Within the next five years, and possibly sooner, the "free pool" of addresses – those that have not yet been used or assigned – will run out.
Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) is a solution for this problem. To learn more about IPv6 dowload the IPv6Fact sheet which has been prepared by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
