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Redirected from: IP address starvation

Definition: IPv4 address exhaustion


The last official allocation of IPv4 Internet addresses was in 2019, and new addresses are old addresses that are recycled. Although IPv4 provides 4.3 billion unique addresses, the growth of the Internet was not foreseen, and many large blocks of IPv4 addresses were allocated in the early years of the Internet without careful consideration. Many have been wasted. The 128-bit IPv6 addressing scheme was developed to supersede IPv4, and it provides an almost unlimited number of addresses. See IANA, IPv6, IPv4 addressing and IPv6 addressing.