The European Internet registry -- RIPE NCC -- is expected to exhaust its supply of IPv4 addresses as early as next week, putting more pressure on U.S.-based multinational corporations to deploy the replacement technology known as IPv6.
RIPE NCC has about 10 million IPv4 addresses to dole out in a business-as-usual fashion to European carriers, enterprises and other network operators to meet their three-month projections for subscriber growth. When these 10 million addresses are gone, RIPE NCC will go into strict conservation mode with its final block of 16 million IPv4 addresses, which is called a /8 in network engineering parlance. Once all of its IPv4 addresses are gone, RIPE NCC will give carriers only IPv6 addresses for their new subscribers.
