Last IP addresses allocated, says IANA

Miami/Berlin, February 3, 2011 (DPA:The internet reached a watershed moment on Thursday when the authority in charge of IP addresses allocated the last available addresses.

The Miami, Florida-based Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) said it had allocated the last of the so-called IPv4 address spaces.

A few days ago, IANA said it was down to the last five unallocated "Class A" batches, each containing 16 million addresses.

The allocation means that IANA has reached the full capacity of 4.3 billion IP addresses around the globe.

IANA now says it is speeding up work on the next-generation IP address, the Internet Protocol version 6, or IPv6.