Internet Officially Runs Out of IP Addresses, New Longer Ones Are Replacements
They planned for this back in 1999—and, no, we don't mean Y2K. We're talking about the day the Internet ran out of IP or address numbers, something that seems impossible, but clearly is not. On Thursday, the Number Resources Organization, the official group that hands out those long numbers that are assigned to your particular computer, announced that the last one of 4.3 billion addresses had been given away.
Before you go crazy and contemplate life without the Internet (and there's only so much fun you can have with your smartphone), buck up. The NRO has already planned for this eventuality and has a new pool of numbers to draw on. The pro side: they are shiny and new. The con: they are decidedly long. You see, the new numbers are 340 undecillion long. That's 340 trillion groups of one trillion networks each. This reporter has seen it written out, but the sheer number of zeros is staggering, so best not to retry the effort. We'll probably leave a zero off and get a pack of mathematicians calling us.
John Curran, of the American Registery for Internet Numbers, told CNN, "A billion sounds like a lot, but when you think that there's really 7 billion people on the planet and you're talking about two, three, four, five addresses per person (for Web users) obviously 4.3 billion is not enough."
As for the 340 undecillion addresses, Curran added, somewhat unnecessarily, "I hope this is the only transition we ever have to do."
For the average person, the issue of IP addresses is not one that comes up much because the casual Internet user goes to sites that have names, such as www.technorati.com. However, the actual addresses of sites are strings of numbers and decimal points. The new system uses a much longer string, with numbers and other characters. The new address pool is called iPv6 and the curent on IPv4.
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