For online users, a looming shortage of IP addresses

[babylonsister]

For online users, a looming shortage of IP addresses
The numerical sequences, which allow machines to communicate with one another, could run out in the next few years.
By Ben Arnoldy | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the August 3, 2007 edition

Page 1 of 2

Oakland, Calif. - The seemingly boundless Internet is running out of a key resource: new IP addresses.

IP addresses, which are somewhat like telephone numbers, allow machines in homes and offices to locate and communicate with one another over the global network. The evaporating supply of new addresses – which some estimates say could dry up in about three years – could drive up the price of Internet access as well as disrupt the growth and performance of the network, warn some experts.

Worried that opportunists will hoard addresses to speculatively sell them, the organization responsible for handing out addresses in North America announced Wednesday that it would try to regulate the emerging trade. And in recent months, Internet administrators have been more forcefully urging software vendors, Internet service providers (ISPs), and major content providers to transition to a new addressing system.

Because upgrading can take years, the time to act is now, some experts say. "I suspect we are actually beyond a reasonable time frame where there won't be some disruption. It's just a question of how much," says David Conrad, general manager for the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the top body that allocates IP addresses. "The largest impact to most people would be that there's no way out of paying higher prices for Internet service."

As the pool of new addresses shrinks, explains Mr. Conrad, organizations and companies with surplus addresses are likely to make them available – for a price. That cost will be passed along to consumers when they order Internet access.

more...

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0803/p02s01-ussc.html

[corkhead]

1. OMG we've reached PEAK URL!!!!

:scared:

[blogslut]

3. good one

:)

[GreenPartyVoter]

9. LOL

[LiberalFighter]

2. Then they need to create a different numbering system.

How difficult will it be to change it from 999.999.999.999 to 999.999.999.999.111??

Or maybe assign a different system for cell phones that access the internet.

[Crandor]

4. there already is a new system - IPv6

Content providers don't want to bother with IPv6 as long as almost nobody can use it, though, and ISPs don't want to bother with it until there are enough servers on it for customers to actually care. Chicken and egg problem.

[DaveJ]

6. I wonder how many IPs are being used now...

The csmonitor article doesn't say. I'd think 4.6 billion would be enough the way we currently use IPs, where typically servers use them, but not every individual device. I'd think the transistion might be made when companies start selling personal devices that have their own IPv6 IPs?

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. There's also the way they're distributed

The first few big computing companies to work with the Internet got given a whole 'first number' to themselves - for instance, IBM, or Sun. So they each have 1/256th of the whole address space, whether or not they're using all of it. But it could be tricky for them to give some of that back - their routers, and possibly security, will have been set up assuming they have the whole of that space.

[Speck Tater]

5. The max IP is 255.255.255.255, not 999.999.999.999

This is because the servers store them as four single bytes. If they went to four fields of 2 bytes each then the max would be 65535.65535.65535.65535 and we'd NEVER run out of numbers.

[LiberalFighter]

8. Why don't we start utlizing it then?

[RL3AO]

10. It doesn't work that way.

Everything is binary (aka 0 and 1). 256 works perfect because it is 16 squared.

But not to worry, IPv6 will be the norm soon.