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IPv4 Exhaustion & Address Conservation

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IPv4's 32-bit address space ran out

IPv4's 32-bit address field supports 4.3 billion unique addresses. With billions of devices, smartphones, IoT sensors, and cloud servers all needing addresses, the global pool was exhausted by 2011.

The Internet Engineering Task Force saw this coming in the 1990s and designed IPv6 (128-bit addresses = 3.4 × 10^38) as the long-term solution. In the meantime, several techniques extended IPv4's lifetime.

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