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Are we a couple of years away from the end of the internet?

Quote:

Report: The End of the Internet Is Near

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.

I think we've become way too dependent on the internet to allow it to simply end. Really, that is one of the most ridiculous notions I've heard in a while. The internet will not end, it will just have to change.

This is pretty alarmist. Two reasons:

1) A combination of NAT and CIDR allow us to make better use of the current 32-bit address scheme (IP 4) than what is implied in the article.

2) Most hardware already supports IP v6.

Oh, wait. I just noticed that this is from Fox News. The sky is falling!

Oh, it's from Fox New? Well damn, why did I even bother to read it?

It's silly, by the way, as shown by the above reasons.

I remember reading that PC's wouldn't be able to get much faster that a 486 DX 100 MHz due to the fact that higher speeds would interfere with too many things and wouldn't be able to get FCC approval. Same crappola with the Internet going bye-bye.

Yeah, IPv4 is limited. On the other hand, as has been pointed out, NAT and subnetting allow for more efficient use of available addresses. Much of the currently available address space has been assigned wastefully. If ICANN ever gets off their collective butts and addresses that, we'll be fine.

IPv6 uses 128 bit addressing, versus the 32 bit addressing of IPv4. Adoption has been slow, but when it becomes necessary (which is likely to be many years from now, despite what the article claims) I have confidence that the switchover will be pretty painless. The number of addresses made available by IPv6 is not unlimited, but for all practical intents it might as well be.

Right, because the innernets aren't trucks you can just dump shit on, they're tubes.

I'm going to have to call TOTAL BULLSHIT on this. I'm not gonna say that I understand the intraweb, but I understand the ingenuity of man. We'll get over it. We always do.

Every major OS supports IPv6 now.. and again, subnetting allows us to be much more efficient with IPs.

And even if we did completely run out of IPv4 space, it's not like the Internet would "end".

I really get the feeling this article was designed to scare the people who don't really understand how the Internet works. Boo on that.

Sounds like the same mess that is spreading about how your TV is going to explode in February 2009 unless it's a 50" HD Plasma.

IP Version 6 and NAT basically render this article obsolete. I'm sure this will have 8000 hits on Digg by tomorrow!

I did a presentation on IPv6 in college. It featured a nuclear explosion going off while the 2001: A Space Odyssey main theme played in the back ground as the number of IPs available for addressing with IPv6 rolled onto the screen.

This is how many IPs we can have with IPv6:

340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

I got an A on the presentation!

Gah, I hate these bs articles. Engineered to make you read them, even though the writers themselves probably know it's all bull.

Silly concern. Reminds me of a group of amish sitting on a porch saying, "Electricity is just a silly phase. They'll see the real light soon, and our beeswax cooperative will make millions."