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IPv4.5 is fictional. It is the premise of a satirical SitePoint article, not an Internet standard or a deployable way to create more IP addresses. The real standards-based successor to IPv4 is IPv6, which expands IP addresses from 32 bits to 128 bits.
What is IPv4.5?
IPv4.5 is a fictional scheme in Craig Buckler’s SitePoint article, “IPv4.5 – A New Solution to Internet Address Limits,” published on April 1, 2011, and updated on February 13, 2024. The date and premise mark it as satire, not a technical proposal.
The joke imagines sharing IPv4 addresses between users at opposite points on Earth: an invented address-prioritization server would route packets according to local usage hours. The article’s claims about an organization called ICANT, Professor Michael Rapp, packet misdelivery, geographic advantage, and real-world implementation are part of that fictional scenario. They should not be treated as evidence about networking or actual deployments. Read the SitePoint article.
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No. The article does not establish IPv4.5 as a standard, working system, or tested solution. It provides no deployment evidence, measured performance results, or reliable current statistics. Its alarming framing about the “last remaining IPv4 address” belongs to the joke; it is not a current factual status report.
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Because IPv4.5 is fictional, there are no real IPv4.5 products, configuration steps, or alternatives to compare. The article also does not evaluate practical IPv6 transition methods.
How do IPv4 and IPv6 differ?
The key distinction for address capacity is address length. RFC 791 specifies IPv4 addresses as four octets, totaling 32 bits. RFC 8200 specifies IPv6 as IPv4’s successor and uses 128-bit addresses. The Internet Engineering Task Force published those specifications in 1981 and 2017, respectively.
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| Protocol | Address length | What the cited standard establishes |
|---|---|---|
| IPv4 | 32 bits | RFC 791 specifies the Internet Protocol address format as four octets. RFC 791 |
| IPv6 | 128 bits | RFC 8200 specifies IPv6 as IPv4’s successor and a larger address size. RFC 8200 |
RFC 8200’s authors, S. Deering and R. Hinden, explain the reason for the larger size: “IPv6 increases the IP address size from 32 bits to 128 bits, to support more levels of addressing hierarchy, a much greater number of addressable nodes, and simpler autoconfiguration of addresses.” The RFC Editor notes that RFC 8200 was updated by RFC 9673.
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What to take away from the IPv4.5 premise
- IPv4.5 is a satirical idea from a SitePoint article, not a real networking standard.
- The article’s address-sharing mechanism and supporting claims are fictional.
- IPv6—not IPv4.5—is the standardized successor to IPv4, with 128-bit rather than 32-bit addresses.
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