Bring out yer dead......

You may have noticed that I have placed an IPv4 counter on my blog... What does this mean ? Well are you sitting comfortably ? 

Then I'll begin.....

A long long time ago (around 1970) when the internet was but a wee spark of an idea in some  dope smoking Unix guru's hush puppy wearing head. 

(hey man that's  just a galactic idea...I mean whoa computers talking to each other over thousands or miles ....far out man groovy baby .... pass the joint....) 

They didn't envisage that it would be only slightly less popular than breathing or water in the years to come.....Consequently they only thought that the addressing scheme used by most sites now would be more than fine.... and in it's time who would have thought it would take off the way it did ? 

Currently it's defined in something called Internet Protocol version 4 or IPv4. This has an address space of about four billion entries..... Yup and in a time honoured fashion just like those near sighted hippies of silicon valley underestimated how many bits would be required to count up to midnight on 31st December 1999.... we've hit the same digital wall as the millennium bug but on a much much much larger scale... 

We are quickly running out of numbers.....

Unless you've had your head stuck in the sand for the past 3 or 4 years you might have heard something about IPv6 which doesn't have this  trivially small 4 billion limit.... 

So how many addresses can IPv6 handle ? 

The short answer is: lots. The long answer is: an unimaginably huge amount. in fact a mind blowingly mahoosive number that makes you reach for the paracetamol each time you try to get your head around it....

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It has been calculated that the IPv6 address space can handle about 340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses. That's enough for every person on the planet to have trillions of IP addresses without any fear of that pool being exhausted. Or to put it another way that's "about" one IP address for every square millimetre of the Earth's surface (including under the oceans).... 

So at some point this year there will probably be some media outcry that the internet will grind to a halt.... and that McDonalds will go out of business (one can hope) .....much in the same way jet planes were going to fall out of the sky on New Years Day 2000..... However the truth is that it might get a bit patchy....some sites won't be accessible if they switch over to IPv6 and you're still on IPv4...until they iron out the crinkles......

This means ISP's will have to get their fingers out and upgrade all their equipment to support IPv6 and in the interim we (meaning ADSL and Cable users) will probably be NAT'ed (network address translation) which will mean some bit of fancy kit will translate the IPv6 numbers into IPv4 numbers and vice versa .... although eventually we will have to migrate to native IPv6....

I can see a bumpy ride on the horizon :)