Recently there were several scary “news headlines” on the web claiming that the Internet is running out of addresses. Refer to those articles:
- Internet will run out of IP addresses by 2010, warns Vint Cerf
- Father of the internet: ‘web is running out of addresses’.
So, we would like to make it clear that such headlines are actually rather inaccurate.
It is certainly true that IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) is running out of addresses, because technically it only supports 4 billion of them (2^32). However, we saw this coming at least 16 years ago, and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) adopted Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) way back in 1996.
This provides up to 2^128 addresses (340 trillion trillion trillion or 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) which means there are well over 4 billion addresses for everybody on the planet!
Indeed, according to Wikipedia, IPv6 can provide 2^52 addresses for each of the 70 sextillion observable stars in the known universe, which we think may constitute “comfortable headroom” even for a pan-galactic internet.
