What are the practical consumer-level implications of this? My understanding is that every internet-enabled device needs a unique IP address. If there are no more unique addresses, can no more devices connect to the internet in this region?
Excuse me if I'm being dense, but why does every internet enabled device need a unique IP? I thought the service providers had unique IPs and we just made our requests through them.
This is where many people can share one IP. But NAT has problems - you can make connections, but you can't accept connections from elsewhere. And it sometimes breaks particular applications.
The only real solution is widespread IPv6 adoption, which seems depressingly unlikely right now.