How can the internet be running out of IP addresses?

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I read an article that says “amassing IP addresses has become a lucrative business because the American internet registry and its counterparts around the world are running out of unique addresses—or at least the current version, IPv4, of which there are about four billion. A switch to the next generation is under way, which will make billions more addresses available, but it will take years to complete.” Why is it so hard to just type a code that creates more addresses?

In: Technology

9 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The current ipv4 system only has room for 2^32 numbers max (4.3 Billion and a lot fo those are wasted on nonsense).

Creating a system that involves more addresses is something that people have already done more than two decades ago. It is called IPv6.

The problem is getting everyone to switch to the new system.

Anonymous 0 Comments

IPv4 is a big neighborhood, and people kept building more and more houses. Each house needs a house number so that they can get mail, but there’s only a certain amount of space in the neighborhood before every plot is taken, and there’s no more room to build another house.

IPv6 is a *much* bigger neighborhood, and it’ll let us keep building houses and giving them house numbers for a long, long time. Before we can start delivering mail there, though, we need to get every post office to agree that they’ll deliver mail to those new house addresses.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Why wouldn’t we all upgrade?

Anonymous 0 Comments

IPv4 addresses are 32 bit numbers. Meaning they are encoded from sets of 32 1’s and 0’s. Since each of those 32 bits can take on two values (1 and 0), there are 2^32 or 42,949,67,296 possible values. That’s a big number, but there are *a lot* of devices connected to the internet and the number is growing. This is why we need to switch to addresses made from a longer series of numbers (such as 64) that will leave us so many addresses that we basically cannot run out.

Anonymous 0 Comments

an ip address is 4x 8 bit numbers. that’s it. exactly how they’re tallied and how stuff works is more complicated – there are entire qualifications half of which are taken up by various forms of subnetting. the highest value you can have in an 8 bit number is 255; it then overflows back to 0. 255(U8BIT) + 1(U8BIT) = 0(U8BIT). The “U” there stands for unsigned, basically meaning it cannot be negative.

In short, the IP (internet protocol) only exists as a set of rules. There isn’t one single IP server that all the others are subservient to or whatever – it’s just a set of protocols that we all follow if we want to communicate concisely. We can’t add an address higher than 255.255.255.255 because (among other reasons lol) that would overflow it by one bit somewhere. that would make an ip address 3x 8 bits and 1x 9 bits. How can you tell it’s either one just by receiving the data over a data line? you wouldn’t know where to stop reading the address considering that data sent over these lines is literally just a series of numbers.

this is a much condensed version of things so be sure to reply and tell me what you’d like for me to elaborate on – there’s no way the above two paragraphs can be enough for you to understand from scratch.

also, we don’t give every single device an ip address. we use something called NAT to facilitate ip connectivity on multiple devices connected to one gateway which has only one ip address. if we gave every device an ip address and didn’t subnet anything we would probably have run out before the year two thousand.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The code to support more addresses, called IPv6, has been standardized and deployed since 1998. The problem is that in order for it to work, everybody has to update their software. That it super hard, as there are 1B devices that have to be updated. Devices that aren’t updated won’t be able to access the services, and nobody wants to tell someone “no Internet for you!”.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It won’t take years to move to the new state. Most new devices are already using the new system.

Every single device connected to the internet requires an ip address, so it’s very easy to see why the current system has run out. Everyone has a router at home, then a typical family of 4 each have a phone, maybe 1 or 2 of those have a 4g enabled smart watch, etc, etc.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There is an organization that sell ip addresses. I forget the name but its sells ip ranges to isp and such.

Anonymous 0 Comments

And, on the ipv6 side there is almost no chance of running out of addresses yet ISPs are only providing 1 range of IPs which are typically enough instead of /48 which would allow people 65k subnets which is recommended because of nearly infinite size of the ipv6 address space.