What's New: Internet Running Out Of Space

At the current rate of usage, the Internet will run out of addresses in about 5 years. The current IP address space, known as IPv4, supports about 4 billion addresses (2^32). For a while now, engineers have been working on a larger address space, IPv6, that promises 2^128 addresses, or 3.4 x 10^38. As Wikipedia puts it, this is equivalent to over an octillion addresses for every person alive today (around 5 x 10^28). The main challenge to adopting IPv6 in America is inertia...as the first country on the Internet there is a lot of infrastructure to replace and upgrade, and it was not until recently that operating systems like Windows supported IPv6 without additional patches or software.

Wednesday, May 23, 2007 10:28 am CDT

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