A new Internet is coming—whether you like it or not!
29 Jun 2009
“Look out! The world is about to run out of network addresses.”
Business network users have been hearing this warning for some time. Is this a real concern, or is it simply a case of “the boy who cried wolf?”
The current Internet addressing scheme, commonly known as Internet Protocol version 4 or IPv4, was invented in the late 1970s. It provided 4,294,967,296 or approximately 4.3 billion Internet addresses. In 1975 the earth’s entire population was about 4 billion. To IPv4’s designers that meant just about one Internet address per person. Certainly that should have been plenty—especially, since, at the time, only a handful of developed countries had Internet access. It was totally unimaginable that the IPv4 address space could ever be exhausted.
