How can the internet be running out of numbers? What numbers? I don’t see any numbers?
Well, it is. Although the consequences are not as severe as you might think. Here’s why ….
Numbers? What numbers?
When we go to the internet for something, let’s say google, we type in www.google.com in the addess bar. Because that’s how we think of google, by its name. But that’s not how the internet thinks of it. Internally, the internet thinks of google as a string of 4 numbers. Today, that number is 74.125.67.100. Try it!
This is how internet “addresses” work. A string of 4 groups of numbers, separated by three periods. But you don’t use those numbers! Where did I get them from?
The very first time we go to google, our web browser takes a detour and looks up google in a special lookup service. It’s just like, if every time you phoned Aunt Mabel, you checked in the phone book to see if she moved. Then you put her phone number into the phone and she answers. The same happens with your web browser. It looks up Aunt Mabel’s website address and then “dials” that internet address.
So that’s what we’re talking about when we say the internet runs on numbers.
How many internet numbers are there?
There are approximately 4 billion internet numbers (they are properly called IP addresses).
Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Actually, for our current usage, it’s not a very big number. Experts estimate the numbers will be used up by 2012 or so. If you consider that, at least in the west, it’s not unusual for every person to have a home computer, a work computer, a cell phone that is also a computer, etc, and the population of the world is crowding 4 billion, it’s easy to see how we could run out soon.
This sounds like a massive problem!
Well, it is a problem. But it’s not as massive as it sounds.
A new scheme is being adopted. It has more numbers. But changing to the new scheme means that many (most) places you go on the internet will have to change numbers.
Remember when New York split into two area codes? Los Angeles? Chicago? Toronto? Remember how much work that was? You had to get a new phone book and put everyone’s new phone number in it.
Thankfully, it won’t be that complicated for the internet.
How is that possible?
On a regular basis, when you go to the internet, your browser checks for the current address for a website. Because maybe it moved. One fine day, you’ll ask where Google is, and maybe it moved from California to British Columbia. Your browser does this for you. Every day. Invisibly (and quickly).
Some day about 2 years from now, your browser will ask where Google is, and it will get a long address instead of a short one. As a user, you’ll never see the difference. Under the covers, your software will know. But you won’t. Isn’t that cool?
It can’t be that simple, can it?
No, it isn’t quite that simple. The name servers on the internet need to be rewritten. Some parts of the operating system on your computer, cell phone, PDA or GPS may need to be rewritten. Depending on the age of your operating system, it may never be rewritten (I expect windows 95, for instance, won’t work after the switch-over). But provided you keep your operating system and browser software up to date, you may not even notice the difference. It will “just work”.
For the more technically inclined
The old internet addressing scheme was called IPv4. It provided for 4 billion internet addresses. Some addresses were reserved, however, and remain unavailable. Some are reserved for obvious and necessary reasons. Others are not, but at the moment, it’s too expensive to determine which are which.
We should have run out of internet addresses already, except for a few technologies that kept us going. The most important here is NAT (Network Address Translation). If you have two or more computers at home and a router, you probably are using NAT. See how painless that was? The router had an address on the full internet, and the two computers behind the router have only “internal” addresses. The router box “translates” (hence the name) the internet addresss to the external ones. If you’ve stayed at a hotel or used the company computers at work, you were probably behind a NAT gateway. All the hotel computers, and those of all their guests, lived behind 1 real IP address on the real internet.
The new internet addressing scheme is IPv6. The number of possible IP addresses is enormous (so enormous that “running out” will not be an issue). But that’s almost irrelevant. The intent is to hand IPv6 addresses out in a different way, “wasting” space in order to have a more logical assignment of addresses to computers.
Vista supports IPv6. Windows XP comes with an experimental, development version of IPv6. What this means exactly is unclear to me.
In any case, because of NAT, it probably won’t matter for many years what your home operating systems support. At most, you might need to upgrade your router box to do IPv6 translation, if your ISP doesn’t do something similar on your behalf. At this point, ISP plans are still unclear.