The End Of The Internet Is Near!
The end of the Internet is near — and in less than three years, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The reason? More than 85% of the available addresses have already been allocated and the OECD predicts we will have run out completely by early 2011.
These aren’t the normal web addresses you type into your browser’s window, and which were recently freed up by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the body responsible for allocating domain names, to allow thousands of new internet domains ending in, for instance, .newyork, .london or .xxx.
Beneath those names lie numerical Internet protocol addresses that denote individual devices connected to the internet. These form the foundation for all online communications, from e-mail and web pages to voice chat and streaming video.
When the current IP address scheme was introduced in 1981, there were fewer than 500 computers connected to the Internet. Its founders could be forgiven for thinking that allowing for a potential 4 billion would last for ever. However, less than 30 years later, the Internet is rapidly running out. Every day thousands of new devices ranging from massive web servers down to individual mobile phones go online and gobble up more combinations and permutations.
“Shortages are already acute in some regions,” says the OECD. “The situation is critical for the future of the internet economy.”
As addresses run dry we will all feel the pinch: Internet speeds will drop and new connections and services will either be expensive or simply impossible to obtain. The solution to the IP address shortage is an upgrade to new addresses that can accommodate our hunger for online connectivity. Such a system, called IPv6, was agreed more than a decade ago, providing enough addresses for billions upon billions of devices as well as improving Internet phone and video calls, and possibly even helping to end e-mail spam.
(Fox)
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July 7th, 2008 at 4:27 pm“Internet speeds will drop”
I found that it’s getting slower since a year
July 7th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
frenchie
July 7th, 2008 at 6:52 pmTry cleaning the cheese out of your computer.
it’s really not that hard to start writing in patches now to allow for longer IP addresses. by the time we’re expected to ‘run out’ we’d have had plenty of time to upgrade software and firmware to the new standards.
It’s just like the 6 digit telephone number
July 7th, 2008 at 7:29 pmIPV6 is alive and well, as usual, the military will lead the way. It’s already employed in Europe and Aisia because they are the one’s running out of I.P. space.
July 7th, 2008 at 7:32 pmLike global warming this is much ado about nuthin’.
I guess if you think Algore invented this thing called the internet, and you believe in his latest scam, global taxing, you might be worried, if you live in the real world though this should be the least of your worries.
One other point, if the rest of the world would use private I.P. space, proxies and Network Address Translation like we do in the U.S of A we would not even be close to running out of IPV4 I.P. space.
Everyone in Europe is so far ahead of us in technology why can’t they figure this out? Only us military guy’s and gal’s can figure it out?
The real worry is a leftist president giving away our DNS servers to the U.N.
July 7th, 2008 at 7:44 pma huh. Yep, the internet is going to die. And the earth is really flat, the cheques in the mail etc. The internet (like television) will only die when something better comes along. Good luck with that.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:13 amAs, displaced ched head already said IP.V6 has already addressed this issues and most systems are already ready for this change. This is pure propaganda and fear mongering like Y2K. Most universities, large corporate data centers and the Fed use it already.
July 8th, 2008 at 2:56 amHoly IP Address, Batman. Are we gonna have to go through another Y2K panic? I went through that in 1999 at Citibank. We busted our butts for over a year PLUS Citibank hired back retired programmers for their legacy mainframe systems (@ $150 per hour) to re-code for the “apocolypse” and nothing happened. Was it because of our efforts or because nothing was going to happen? As prepared as Citibank was, there were probably thousands of companies that weren’t prepared, yet we heard no horror stories.
Is this another situation like that?
July 8th, 2008 at 5:14 amTotally agree; this sounds like another y2k scare.
July 8th, 2008 at 6:14 am