>Do you have an idea of how many IPv4 addresses that are unused or not really needed?
If by "really needed" you mean just in terms of having one address for each machine then sure there's a bunch not being used. Let's suppose half of them. Assuming a constant growth rate, that would last us for ten more years. But actually internet adoption is still accelerating. A safer assumption would be something like five.
But our routers would collapse under the strain of the enormous routing tables long before then. To be able to route efficiently subnets need to be logical regions in the network topology, not arbitrary collections of 2^n machines. CIDR, needed to mitigate against the shortage of IPv4 addresses (or more properly the shortage of subnets) has been slowing the internet down since 1993.
>Between the bunch MIT got, the bunch that the military got and the bunch that IBM got, we can implement an entirely new protocol before we run out.
Given that we've been working on IPv6 for 15 years and it's not fully deployed yet, no we can't. Even if every single address was unallocated today, we'd use them up before then.
If by "really needed" you mean just in terms of having one address for each machine then sure there's a bunch not being used. Let's suppose half of them. Assuming a constant growth rate, that would last us for ten more years. But actually internet adoption is still accelerating. A safer assumption would be something like five.
But our routers would collapse under the strain of the enormous routing tables long before then. To be able to route efficiently subnets need to be logical regions in the network topology, not arbitrary collections of 2^n machines. CIDR, needed to mitigate against the shortage of IPv4 addresses (or more properly the shortage of subnets) has been slowing the internet down since 1993.
>Between the bunch MIT got, the bunch that the military got and the bunch that IBM got, we can implement an entirely new protocol before we run out.
Given that we've been working on IPv6 for 15 years and it's not fully deployed yet, no we can't. Even if every single address was unallocated today, we'd use them up before then.