President and CEO of American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), John Curran, announced the exhaustion of the North American Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) pool.
As we all know, a movement to motivate organizations across the industry to enable and transition to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) has been underway for several years. Sounds like we might be approaching crunch time. As you may know, many countries have already hit this milestone.*
“Technologists have known for years that we would run out of IPv4 addresses, which is why the IPv6 standard was created in the late 1990s. While IPv4 was limited to just about 4 billion addresses, IPv6 will provide 340 undecillion addresses (a one followed by thirty-six zeroes). That’s enough to give 5×1028 addresses to every single person on the planet.” – WIRED
Of course, this means that networking engineers will need to continue to develop their IPv6 addressing knowledge and skills. IPv6 is tested in many Cisco Certification Exams, including the entry level ICND1 exam, CCNP Route Exam, CCIE Routing and Switching and many others.