The Problem With IPv4

The growing popularity of the internet in the 1990s led to potential network problems that threatened global network communications. The reason for that was the insufficient IPv4 address space, which was not large enough to identify all network-capable devices needing internet access.

IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses, which provides a maximum of 4.3 billion unique IPv4 addresses. This shortage of IPv4 addresses has led to the development of private and public IPv4 addresses as a solution. The idea behind this concept was to reduce the total number of unique IPv4 addresses used by allowing local networks to reuse the same private IPv4 addresses.

However, as much as this approach conserves IPv4 addresses, it does not allow internet communication, for which public IPv4 addresses must be used. This is where the concept of Network Address Translation (NAT) comes in handy.