The Internet will run out of addresses in another two years as only 700 million unique  addresses are remaining for allocation out of the 4.3 billion available on the present network.

The addressing we follow today is IPv4, which is 32bit. This means there are 2 to the power of 32 , or 4.3 billion addresses available. When the IP addressing was developed, 4.3 billion was considered to be more than adequate, as the population of earth at the time was roughly about 4 billion.

The accute shortage of IPv4 addresses would see the transitioning from IPv6 IPv4 to it’s 128 bit big brother, the IPv6. The Internet Protocol version 6 will have 340 trillion-trillion-trillion new addresses needed to connect not only billions of new users but also the trillions of sensor devices that will require networking as technology takes greater control of people’s lives.

“IPv6 provides more addresses in cyberspace than there are grains of sands on the world’s beaches,”  quoted Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for the Information Society.