IPv4 apocalypse means we just can't measure the internet any more

IPv4 address exhaustion is making it harder to measure the size of the Internet, even as IPv6 deployment accelerates.

While IPv6 activity doubled in 2015 (to 400 million addresses by year-end), the vast majority of users are still on IPv4 addresses, mostly via dynamic assignment or behind carrier-grade Network Address Translation (NAT) boxes.

Akamai and MIT researchers say the growth in the IPv4 address space hit the ceiling in 2014 and is stagnant at a little over 800 million (each month), and 1.2 billion unique addresses for the whole of 2015. At APNIC, lead author Philipp Richter of Akamai and the Technical University of Berlin writes: “The stagnant active IPv4 client address counts, despite ongoing Internet growth, mark a new era of the Internet: one in which Internet growth cannot be tracked by counting active IPv4 addresses anymore.”