A lot of attention has been given to the recent announcement that the Internet Address and Naming Agency (IANA) has allocated the last remaining 7 blocks of IP addresses – roughly 300 million addresses. IP addresses are the numbers read by the computer to identify a website, whilst we see the website address as youtube.com, your computer will instead see its address as a collection of four “dotted quads” of numbers between 0 and 255, such as 77.91.248.30. So far the Internet has managed to use up 4bn of these addresses, and the absolute limit is 4.3bn.

As usual the problem has been made worse by the short-term thinking of those providing the technology. An alternative IP address system already exists – called IPv6, as opposed to the current IPv4 – which would allow for around 340 trillion IP addresses – leaving plenty of room for new websites and new connections to the Internet. However, there is a drawback to IPv6 in that most current routers and operating systems cannot read them, meaning they would either require a software patch or replacing. Currently only Windows 7 and Apple’s Mac OS X are known to support such addresses – whilst many businesses and home PCs (including huge amounts of new netbooks) are still using the stable but rapidly dating Windows XP which currently has no support in place. In reality when the 300m remaining IPv4 addresses are used up new websites will have to be allocated an IPv6 address, meaning that vast amounts of users will get an error message when trying to visit that website, only IPv6 ready devices and routers will be able to access it.

Some have predicted that the remaining 300m IPv4 addresses could be gone by the end of the year, so only time will tell if the world will have updated its software and hardware before IPv6 addresses come into wider use (Facebook is already experimenting with the new addresses alongside existing ones). In the meantime, you might want to sign up to our excellent webhosting to make sure you get your IPv4 address.