Internet Runs Out of IP Addresses
Posted in: Today's Chili
Well, the Internet. It was a good run. We’ll miss your funny cat pictures and videos of chubby kids playing with light sabers. I wonder what’s on the TV. Wait, what’s that you say? IPv6 is kicking in? Oh, thank god. I have so many edits left to make to Lady Gaga’s Wikipedia entry.
The long awaited end of IPV4 addresses occurred to day. As Raul Echeberria, the head of the Numbers Resource Organization put it, “This is an historic day in the history of the internet, and one we have been anticipating for quite some time.”
IPv4 offered up around 4.3 billion IP addresses–a number that surely sounded like plenty when it first got up and running, but the sheer number of Internet-accessing devices people own these days, we’re currently blowing past that number.
IPv6 has been around since 1999. The service has an obscene number of addresses available–340 undecillion. Yep–undecillion. It’s an actual number. That’s 340 followed by 36 zeros.
Here you go,
340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
The transition won’t affect most users, since access it generally URL-based. Businesses, on the other hand, may want to make sure they’re ready for the shift.
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