The move to IPv6 finally heats up

It is suddenly ‘breaking news’ that the world will run out of Internet addresses sometime next year. I wrote about this subject back in October, 2007 in an article called “IPv6 Support Is Now Mandatory for Many Suppliers”. It was published in the Indus Business Journal and can also be found on my website.

When the structure if Internet addressing was originally created, no one could have envisioned that someday billions of small computing devices would need Internet connectivity. If you want to connect to the Web, you need a numeric address and there are not enough to go around.

Luckily, IPv6 came along and expanded the addressing structure. We now have plenty of addresses as long as hardware and software suppliers implement the new structure. Of course, they have been slow in getting there because the need has not been great enough. Well, it’s time!

This may not seem like a big deal to you but if we were to actually run out of addresses, you might not be able to connect that new smartphone or tablet device you want to the Internet. That would surely ruin your day.

Read my article if you want more details and relax…we won’t be running out of address space on the Internet any time soon.