Depletion of the pool of unallocated IPV4 addresses because there are fewer than 4.3 billion addresses available depletion has been anticipated, when the internet started to experience romantic growth this depletion is one of the reasons for the development and deployment of successor protocol, IPV6.

IP address space is managed by the IANA (Internet Assigned Number Authority) and by five regional Internet registries.

IPV4 increasingly become the defact standard for networked digital communication and the cost of embedding substantial computing power into hand held devices dropped, mobile phones have become viable internet hosts new specification of 4G device require IPV6 addressing.