There are renewed fears that the world's supply of Internet addresses will be exhausted as early as this December, if those fears produce an upswing in demand for existing supplies. Known as Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, these unique numerical identifiers "tag" each device connected to the Internet or other network and current projections estimate that the supply has less than one year to go.
"When the IPv4 protocol was developed 30 years ago," stated John Lindsay of Internode, "it seemed to be a reasonable attempt at providing enough addresses, bearing in mind that at that point personal computers didn't really exist."
Today, the number of addresses is woefully inadequate.
This limitation is part of the IPv4 protocol, which provides a numerical value for alphanumeric strings such as domain names. For example, 123.456.789.0 could be the address of www.example.com, in much the same way that your telephone number is associated with your name. Unless they are using advanced voice recognition features, a person seeking to talk to you does not call your name, they dial your phone number — the process is similar on the Internet — and there are very few of those numbers left.
There is a solution to this problem, however, in the form of the IPv6 protocol, which offers 128-bit addressing (a practically unlimited amount), in comparison to the 32-bits (around 4.3 billion addresses) of IPv4. That is a lot more domain names and other uses, such as air conditioners on the smart grid, home security systems, and innovative adult content offerings with Internet-enabled sex toys, yet to come.
The problem is that the world is not yet ready for IPv6 — and may not be before the addresses run out. India, for example, will not be ready before March of 2012, but will feel the pinch of evaporating IP address supplies as it rolls out its massive 3G networks before then, since each Smartphone requires its own unique address.
While IPv6 is backward-compatible with IPv4, IPv4 is not forward-compatible with IPv6, meaning, that it is not just the Internet Service Providers and other stakeholders that must invest in new infrastructure, consumers may also have to spend money on new hard and software, or risk missing out on "the new Internet." This economic commitment may slow adoption of IPv6, even as the general supply of IP addresses runs out.
"Your ISP needs to do a lot of work, and if you're not willing to pay more money to your ISP, your poor old ISP has got to spend extra money without extra income," Geoff Huston of Asia-Pacific IP allocator APNIC, said. "Those services that have the highest capacity to pay will still be able to get more addresses, but those who can't get denied."