If nothing is done, the growth of the Internet will slow to a crawl as new online services scrounge for the few remaining patches of online real estate.
“When the Internet was conceived, they certainly didn’t envision that it would grow to the size and the popularity that it is now,’’ said Jason Livingood, executive director of Internet systems engineering at the cable giant Comcast Corp., which provides broadband service to 15 million homes and businesses. Comcast is one of the businesses that, along with governments and other organizations, have worked for years to end the online-address drought.
Thanks to those efforts, the online universe is about to expand.
The Internet Engineering Task Force, a global network of computer engineers and network administrators, is implementing Internet Protocol version 6, a new online addressing scheme so vast that humans will never use it up.
“There are essentially as many IPv6 addresses as there are atoms on the surface of the earth,’’ said Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Center for Bits and Atoms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
IPv6 sets the stage for a truly connected world. With an unlimited pool of addresses, billions of manmade objects could all be logged into the global Internet — cars, appliances, even the bottles in our medicine cabinets.
An Internet address is similar to a phone number. When you type, say, “boston.com’’ into a browser, your computer translates those letters into the site’s true Internet address — which, in this case, is 66.151.183.41. Under the current addressing system — Internet Protocol version 4, or IPv4 — there simply aren’t enough of these phone numbers to keep the Internet growing.
There are already more networked devices than Internet addresses — more than 5 billion, according to the British technology consulting firm IMS Research. The Internet keeps growing, though, thanks to “network address translation,’’ or NAT, a gimmick that lets one address serve multiple devices. Your home broadband router has a true Internet address. It then uses NAT to assign local addresses to your laptop, your game console, and your smartphone, and then serves as their bridge to the Internet, passing data back and forth.
