ip4

Things could be about to get really interesting pretty soon…

Sometimes around 4 a.m. on February 2nd – next Wednesday morning – the very last of the still-available IP addresses under the traditional IPv4 scheme will be allocated.

And then the Internet as it has existed since IPv4 was established in 1977 will, for all intents and purposes, be running on empty.

“Who the hell knew how much address space we needed?” said Vint Cerf, Internet pioneer and father of the World Web Web. At the time Cerf and his colleagues thought that it would be a ridiculously long amount of time (they may have assumed it would not be within their own lifetime) before the Internet would run out of IP numbers. They couldn’t have possibly foreseen not only Internet usage in private home but also mobile devices, streaming video and the like. In 1977, 4.3 billion possible ...

Abby Prince of WebProNews has filed a fascinating story, albeit one with significant ramifications, about the fast-evaporating pool of available Internet Protocol (IP) numbers. Ever since the Internet’s inception the computers connected to it have been given addresses under the original IP4 scheme. But with the increase of devices that use the Internet combined with the number of developing countries that are beginning to build up their information infrastructure, there is a dwindling number of IP addresses still free for use. A new scheme, the IP6 protocol, has already been developed but it’s far from being fully implemented… meaning we could possibly and likely will see an IP numbers “crunch” in the near future.

Hit here for some excellent reporting about the issue....

World running out of Internet (as we’ve known it)

Internet running out of IP addresses