Over the past year, IPv6 has finally started making inroads towards adoption as the dominant protocol on the World Wide Web. It’s rather good timing too, since the realities of IPv4 exhaustion are starting to outweigh the hype around IPv6 – the first regional Internet Registry to run out of IPv4 space was APNIC (Asia Pacific) in 2011, followed by RIPE NCC (Europe) in 2012. LACNIC (Latin America and the Caribbean) was the next to deplete its pool in 2014, and ARIN (North America) ran out of addressing space in late 2015. AFRINIC, the address repository for the African continent, is expected to run out of IPv4 addressing space within the next few years. But although IP address exhaustion gets a lot of hype, it’s not the only reason that a shift towards IPv6 is crucial to the survival of the internet as we know it.

A few weeks ago, we posted an infographic explaining the internet protocol (IP) and the state of IP today, which goes over some of the turning points and defining moments in IP history. You can download the infographic here, or download our Network Manager’s Guide to a Stable and Highly Available Network to find out more about IRIS’ Network Management Software.

Image Credit: roysmithfx.blogspot.com