Internet has less than a year’s worth of IP addresses left
Tue ,07/27/2010The Internet is about to face one of its most serious issues in its history: experts have warned that the Internet is running out of IP addresses. 94% of the available internet addresses have already been allocated and the remaining 6% are projected to be used up by 2011.
Currently, the web uses IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4). 32-bit numbers are used, meaning about 4 billion addresses are available. The challenge is to switch to IPv6 which is 128 bit and has much more IP addresses available. Adoption of IPv6 has been slow; however, Google and Facebook have recently made great strides to begin to deploy IPv6.
Though there are ways around the lack of IPs such as having devices share an IP, those are just temporary solutions. The long-term solution still must be the deployment of IPv6 in the future.





