Internet Space: The IPcalypse is Imminent!

Remember life before the internet? No, neither do I.

You can shop online. Pay bills online. Play games online. Research online. Socialise online. Basically, whatever it is you want to do, you can probably do it online. In short, there is no stopping the growth of the internet and people are becoming increasingly dependent on it. Nevertheless, you probably haven’t given much thought to internet space and whether or not we might just be running out of it.

We will, in fact, run out of internet space as we know it on February 2nd at approximately 4pm, according to ISP Human Electric. The reason for this is that the current system being used to assign IP addresses can only handle about 4 billion unique addresses.

But before you start panicking, steps have already been taken to ensure that the IPcalypse does not consume the online world. A new system, called IPv6 has been designed to incorporate numbers and letters, ensuring that there will be no internet space crisis in the foreseeable future.

Don’t believe me? Well, at the risk of being accused of making up numbers on the spot, this is the number of IP addresses that IPv6 can handle:

340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456

And yes, I can prove it. Or at least show you a page proving it.