Sorry, I believe I got my facts wrong. NAT isn't used within the majority of ISPs. But it is used by some, and it works.

IP version 6 is a much better design, that's true, but version 4 can still be used for the foreseeable future. The transition will certainly happen over time.

Having now read the original BBC article, I can see that IANA are the source of this scaremongering.

Bear in mind people, that they have a vested interest in people believing this story - they're a business that makes huge sums of money selling numbers. Yep, you heard that right... Do they actually make anything? No. Do they actually provide any type of service? No. They make loads of cash selling something entirely imaginary, that only has scarcity due to the format those numbers come in. They sell IP address ranges.

And guess what? Demand has run low. So they scare people into saying that network address translation is painfully slow and will ruin the internet. Well guess what, your ISP already uses it. Even if you removed the tiny delay that this process takes, it won't increase your connection speed - there are so many other factors which play a part in that, the significance of translation is almost nothing.

Plus, if you read the last part of the BBC article you'll see that this message is targeting business firms, who themselves use network address translation.

Your local ISP is the one who buys internet addresses on your behalf, and they know this story is bogus. It's not targeted at them.

This isn't even aimed at company network administrators. They know this is bogus too. The story is targeted at business managers who don't understand the mechanics of computer networking. IANA hope they'll scare them enough into pestering the network admins for more addresses. The network admin will explain why it's a waste of time and money, but the technical explanation won't make sense to the manager, who only understands that the world will end and the whole internet will crash unless they do something to fix it.

This isn't global warming. It's just a means of further a scam, where billions are made selling something entirely imaginary.

For an end user connected to an internet service, this is a non issue.

Firstly, there is a difference between a local IP address and a public one.

Your local IP is in all likelyhood what your ISP doles out to you. They can use almost any address they like within the IP range as it's contained within their network. As a local IP, it could be indentical to someone else another ISP. Seeing as you never use these addresses to communicate over the internet, it doesn't matter.

Your ISP will have a range of public IP addresses, and port mapping is used to support many thousands of users. Port mapping adds a unique reference to you in the port field of network traffic over that IP address. At the ISP this is translated back into your local IP address - your IP maintains this communication between you and the internet.

With port translation, a medium sized city can be supported with 4 or 5 IP addresses. So you can see, this issue of running out of addresses is media hype.

Yes, it's a hack. The port field was never intended to be used this way. but if you look into the actual mechanics of any current networking technology, almost all of it is an elaborate hack to increase the capacity within previous designs.

None of this is an issue for end users, it's pretty much invisible.

Also, IP version 6 has been implemented already in many ISPs. It's already in place. It was a well designed alternative to the hacks that are in place, but in practical terms it simply hasn't been needed.

Despite the scaremongering, you'll find that by the time IP version 4 with port mapping has reached it's limits, the switchover to version 6 will already have happened. There won't be a big song and dance about it, just a slow and gradual switchover. You probably won't even know about it, as your ISP will be using version 6 to communicate over the internet, and you'll still have a version 4 address to communicate between you and them. Why? To support all the legacy hardware that doesn't feature it.

Come on, another BBC article as your source? Have you no shame?

I also can't believe you're quoting their ridiculous "trillions more addresses" quote as well. That watered-down figure is so low-brow that it could only come from a BBC "technology" article. You might as well rip their hokey empty jar stock photo as well.

This site is going down the tubes.