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The end of internet in 2011

pinkcandygirl

Entry posted by pinkcandygirl ·

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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. How will it impact you in case this happens  ??Wink
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pinkcandygirl
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. How will it impact you in case this happens  ??Wink
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Mazzy

Well all that will really change for the average guy, is that internet (or whatever it's new name will be) will become more expensive to afford... sigh... the world only evolves in one direction.

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grezzzy_greer

Its just a matter of upgrading the address system - its exactly the same as a phone number - add more digits and make everyone start to change over to the new address system - yes beej - exactly right - Y2K all over again!

Mind you, I made a really good bit of income on a 3 month project in KL just before the non-event - setting TV station operators minds at ease about the impending "doom and gloom"...wonderful!

Delivered 15 volumes of reports on every device in the station and all it's outlying facilities - each volume was 75mm thick - they paid us and never opened ONE of them! Haha!

It will be much the same with this.

Oh - you have no idea what we have in store for you! IPTV...great stuff - the IT dicks can't even get a text message across town in one piece - never mind continuous, reliable internet TV, that needs thousands of times the bandwidth...have fun !

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grezzzy_greer

Yes, the NAMES you mentioned are DOMAIN NAMES (the dot COM, dot TV, dot ORG etc) - yes we have loads of hem available. But these in turn have to be directly and uniquely related to an Internet Protocol address - every device that connects to the internet is assigned an IP address which exists only for THAT device - and is theoretically totally unique on the planets public internet.

The IP address looks like this - it is a number, say 217.102.34.145 - this sequence has a finite number of combinations, and therefore at some point - now apparently estimated to be 3 years from now - we will have used up all the possible addresses available.

There is a "gotcha" with IP addresses too...each of the numbers separated by the "dot" can only have a value between 0 and 255 - and we usually dont use those two values as they are special case and reserved. This is a limitation of the way we generate the addresses and represent them electronically based on the hexadecimal system which is intimately related to the electronics that handle the address ranges - so it is a hardware, or at the very least - a firmware - upgrade, that is needed.

Thats why there will have to be a MAJOR bit of rework done to extend the IP address range of every single device now connected to the internet, and the upgrade will in fact have to be applied to every network and every computerised internet or network connected device in the world.

That is a shed-load of devices, and a shitload of work - and we have only 3 years - and everything has to KEEP WORKING while we do the upgrade too.

...................headache!

Greer

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