GoKawiilIPv4 address exhaustion drives push toward IPv6 adoption at home
IPv4's 32-bit addressing scheme, which created about 4.3 billion addresses, ran dry years ago, with North America's allocation exhausted in 2015. ISPs have papered over the shortage using carrier-grade NAT, which shares public addresses among groups of customers but can break peer-to-peer connections like online gaming. IPv6, standardized in 1995 with 340 undecillion possible addresses, is meant to solve this permanently but currently coexists with IPv4 rather than replacing it, with Google measuring global IPv6 usage at just under 51 percent.