Businesses worried about the availability of Internet addresses will not happy to hear about what the near future holds for them.
The Internet started out with 4.3 billion Internet Protocol addresses when it was born in 1981 as part of the IPv4 specification, but there are currently only about 3.4 million addresses available in North America, according to The Wall Street Journal. John Curran, president and chief executive of the American Registry for Internet Numbers, expects his company to run out of IP addresses by the end of this summer.
Asia's supply of IP addresses ran out in 2011, and the same happened to Europe a year later.
Computers and servers use IP addresses, which appear as series of numbers with three dots between them, so that they can tell the difference between each other, The Independent reported. This gives Internet users the ability to connect and send web pages, photos and other information to each other. The problem is that the four sets of numbers limit how many different addresses can be used.
The best move recommended to businesses is to move towards IPv6, a new specification created by the Internet Engineering Task Force to deal with shrinking space. This specification has room for 340 undecillion addresses (340 plus 36 zeroes), which would provide an IP address to every atom on Earth.
While many countries have already switched to IPv6, North America has yet to make the big move, The Independent reported. Companies that decide to upgrade have to spend a good amount of money on new hardware that works with the specification.
Sandra Brown, president of IPv4 Market Group, said each IP address costs around $11.25 today, adding that the price is going to go up, WSJ reported. Upgrading specifications has become a popular move for firms looking to build more data centers for their services.
"If we had done nothing for our internal services, then we would not have been able to build new data centers," said Paul, an engineer at Facebook, which switched 90 percent of its network to IPv6.
Companies that don't switch to the new specification will have to use one of the old existing sites instead. This could also lead to problems, as these sites are expected to become more expensive to use since more companies are seeing value in them.
