"Magnitude of the Disaster" is the type of hyperbole that doesn't bring clarity to the situation. I've spent the majority of my working life in the last three

"Magnitude of the Disaster" is the type of hyperbole that doesn't bring clarity to the situation. I've spent the majority of my working life in the last three years happily accessing the internet, internet services, and I've always been behind a PAT device when in a hotel, serviced apartment, etc... For example, right now, in my Office in Singapore, my IP address is: 192.168.108.34. And I do all my conferences, whiteboarding, VPNs, etc.. from this office. Now - back to your scenario - You certainly can share a lot of HTTP Servers on a single IP address - a lot of the customers I've worked with do so using PAT, and, you get very used to the port number being part of the HTTP server address: I.E. http://www.acme.com:3031 http://www.acme.com:3031 In a ultra-low IP address environment, you have teams with not only IPAM (IP address Management tools), but also Port Address Management - they track who has been allocated to which port. Now - is this the best case scenario? - No, obviously not - it would be awesome to have a Static IP address, and, there are some scenarios in which I have to have a static IP address - in particular getting IPSec VPNs through PAT can be problematic, so if I want to run a VPN concentrator, I start begging and pleading to get a static IP address. But I know this is going to cost me a lot of money. And that's where I started - once we run out of IPv4 addresses, the market will just start bidding the price of them up. Right now, most ISPs in Singapore will give you a static IP address for $120/year. I expect, as they run out of IP addresses, that price will start to increase - and people who might have opted in for one at $120/year, will probably decline at $500/year - returning those IP addresses back into circulation. At the same time, if someone is sitting on a /20 that they aren't using very using very much (4,000 addresses) - and those IP addresses have $2million/year of value to other people, they will be highly incentivized to capture that value. With all that said - was it not wonderful to call Layer 42, and, within 30 seconds, be granted 2001:1868:209::/48 off of their /32 ISP range? Yes, it was. I had 65,000 networks I could play with, each of which had effectively infinite address space. Do I look forward to that the day that is universal, in which every ISP user is immediately granted a /64 without asking, and anybody with a home network gets a /56 without paperwork, and a /48 is available with just a quick, inexpensive surcharge? Yes, also looking forward to that. But - "Disaster" and "Catastrophe" doesn't capture what will happen if IPv4 takes a few extra years to get traction. The market and people's behavior will adjust.