The Coming Global IP Outage
First it was Y2K. The world of electronics was going to implode due to a fault in old Cobol programming that could not handle the date string for 2000. Ok, we all survived.
And of course we all know that the Mayans predicted that the end of the long calendar will come on December 21, 2012, when life as we know it will cease. That one remains to be seen.
But in the meantime, the Internet is going to shut down, or at least become really really really slow and/or expensive.
Why?
Because of IPv4, of course!
No, it's not a virus. It's the algorithm by which IP addresses are allocated.
When Al Gore invented the Internet... oh, right. When the Internet was in its infancy, 20-some years ago, IP addresses were being doled out by the Department of Defense. With its 32-bit size, TCP/IP has room for 4.3 billion addresses.
But as long ago as 2006, market researcher Frost & Sullivan predicted that IPv4 would run out of unique IP addresses, leaving new contenders out of luck. This would have particularly dire consequences for nations like Korea and China, relative newcomers to the Internet world. Given that the Internet was, in fact, invented by and in the US, the US had long since grabbed the lion's share of such addresses as demand was ramping up overseas.
Now, with smartphones and other devices gobbling up even more of these precious number strings, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, realizing there will be as many as 17 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2012, is suggesting that there will be no available unique IPs by as early as 2010.
What to do?
The answer, it appears, is to migrate to IPv6, an address scheme which has 128-bit addresses. That comes out to 360,382,386,120,984,643,363,377,707,131,268,210,929 possible addresses.
Asia has already jumped on that bandwagon, using only bridge connections to IPv4. And the US federal government moved all government agency network backbones to IPv6 this past June.
And of course we all know that the Mayans predicted that the end of the long calendar will come on December 21, 2012, when life as we know it will cease. That one remains to be seen.
But in the meantime, the Internet is going to shut down, or at least become really really really slow and/or expensive.
Why?
Because of IPv4, of course!
No, it's not a virus. It's the algorithm by which IP addresses are allocated.
When Al Gore invented the Internet... oh, right. When the Internet was in its infancy, 20-some years ago, IP addresses were being doled out by the Department of Defense. With its 32-bit size, TCP/IP has room for 4.3 billion addresses.
But as long ago as 2006, market researcher Frost & Sullivan predicted that IPv4 would run out of unique IP addresses, leaving new contenders out of luck. This would have particularly dire consequences for nations like Korea and China, relative newcomers to the Internet world. Given that the Internet was, in fact, invented by and in the US, the US had long since grabbed the lion's share of such addresses as demand was ramping up overseas.
Now, with smartphones and other devices gobbling up even more of these precious number strings, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, realizing there will be as many as 17 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2012, is suggesting that there will be no available unique IPs by as early as 2010.
What to do?
The answer, it appears, is to migrate to IPv6, an address scheme which has 128-bit addresses. That comes out to 360,382,386,120,984,643,363,377,707,131,268,210,929 possible addresses.
Asia has already jumped on that bandwagon, using only bridge connections to IPv4. And the US federal government moved all government agency network backbones to IPv6 this past June.
Of the rest, it's predicted that only 30 percent of ISPs (Internet Service Provider networks) will be able to support IPv6 by 2010. Still, from the standpoint of the average user, it's likely to be more talk than trouble, as ISPs rush to convert in the next couple of years.
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