Could the Internet soon run out of addresses? It seems likely, a study says
Online retailers who are taking a niche approach to the market and want to create sub-brands better get their niche sites up soon: IP addresses are going fast, according to researchers at the University of Southern California.
Researchers at USC’s Information Sciences Institute have just completed a census of the Internet and they report the existence of 2.8 billion IP addresses, the 10-digit addresses separated by decimal points (69.67.214.151), out of a possible universe of 4.3 billion. The research confirms that addresses are in danger of being used up in 2010, only three years from now.
Although niche retailers create separate URLs for each market, not every URL is a separate IP address. IP addresses identify servers and so URLs that reside on one server share an IP address.
“As Internet use becomes widespread, we are running out of Internet addresses,” says John Heidemann, Information Sciences Institute project leader and associate professor in USC’s Computer Sciences Department. “The Internet Engineering Task Force, the technical body that manages the Internet, has anticipated this since the 1990s and designed a new protocol, IPv6, to solve this problem, but deployment has been slow. Our data can help illustrate the need to move forward.”
In addition to documenting the expected depletion of IP addresses, the census is helpful from a security point of view, the institute reports. Other Information Sciences Institute researchers are using the census data to study how worms spread in the Internet and to plot maps of where cyber-attacks originate.
Researchers compiled the census by using three machines to send 3 billion inquiries to IP addresses over two months. USC says the last Internet census took place in 1982, when 315 Internet addresses had been allocated.
Back...
