According to experts, there are only 232 million IP addresses left in the world. This is only enough to last about 340 days. An IP address is a unique 32 digit number that is used to identify each computer, internet connected device, and computer website.
IPv4 was developed over 30 years ago. At the time, developers thought that it would be suffice to provide an endless supply of IP addresses for decades to come. However, the personal computer was a rarity at the time, mobile phones did not even exist, and no one would have ever imagined that a air-conditioner might need an IP address. The explosion of home computers and web-enabled devices certainly is the causative factor behind the “well running dry’ on IP addresses.
There is somewhat of a doomsday fear surrounding the internet industry. If/until the problem is fixed, multiple customers would have to share IP addresses, and this would cause all sorts of applications from Gmail to iTunes to stop working correctly.
Experts told the Sydney Morning Herald that the solution is “IPv6,” which was developed several years ago. Ipv6 uses an address with 128 digits, as opposed to the 32 digits used by IPv4. Supposedly, it would allow everyone in the world to have over four billion addresses each.
There are a few in the internet industry (Windows and Mac operating systems, iPhone, etc) that have adopted Ipv6 protocol. Web services such as Facebook and Google have also made strides to adopt IPv6. Australian ISP Internode is the first to offer IPv6 as a commercial service. A spokesperson for Internode told The Sydney Morning Herald that changing from IPv4 to IPv6 is like changing the road and tires while the person is still driving on the road. The spokesman went on to say, “It’s been expensive, it’s been time-consuming and it doesn’t produce an immediate return on investment so it’s the kind of thing that isn’t popular with CFOs. However, it’s laying an important foundation for what happens over the next few years as it becomes increasingly difficult to obtain IPv4 addresses.”
Still, much of the internet industry has not made any attempt to transition. The reluctance is most likely because of the cost and time consumption. Users would also have to buy new hardware and upgrade networking equipment and software. Each internet connecting device would have to upgraded or reconfigured to support IPv6.
If multiple users have to share the IP addresses, the system will definitely become slow. liked it.
This is an eye-opener. Worthy share…
The sky is falling…Again?? Those “experts” always come up with some catastrophe to worry about, only to be proven wrong…Again.
The sky didn’t fall, and no airplanes fell out of the sky on midnight on New Year’s Eve in 1999. But this didn’t mean that there was no problem. Rather, the problem was solved by the countless boring hours that the experts spent pouring over lines of code, adding the extra spaces to allow programmers to tell computers that the current year was 2000, not 1900. It was feared that the computers on board airplanes would think that it was 1900, realized that airplanes weren’t invented yet, and the planes would fall out of the sky.
It took a lot of work and expense to prepare the world’s computers for the new millennium, and this new problem sounds very similar.