When will we need this next generation Internet?

Sooner than you'd think!

The current addressing system of the Internet uses Internet Protocol v4, which provides a total of 4.3 billion addresses, of which only a billion or so is still available. By different accounts, all available IPv4 Internet addresses will be used up sometime between 2010 and 2013, the more recent estimates favoring the 2010 to 2011 timeframe. Once these addresses run out, existing address owners will be fine - only new organizations, individuals, and devices needing unique addresses will be shut out.

The US government and a few US universities which assisted in creating the Internet have been allotted more addresses than all of Asia. This means that a shortage will be seen well before the actual number of in use addresses hit the 4.3 billion maximum. Will these entities sell some of their addresses to be used either commercially or by other governments? If so, it will only be a temporary stopgap.

So what is to be done to prevent the Internet from reaching its maximum size? In the past, technologies like NAT (Network Address Translation) and CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing) have allowed several devices to access the Internet through a single access point or address. With the ever increasing growth of the Internet, these have served merely as a band-aid to the underlying problem.

IPv6, which provides more than 340 trillion raised to the third power addresses has been around for over ten years, but is only beginning to be used by government agencies and universities. These front-runners just can't flip the switch over to IPv6 however, they must run both IPv4 and IPv6 in unison to allow IPv4 (most of the world) access to their sites. This makes service providers balk at the increased costs of maintaining two separate but identical access points to their systems.

Whenever this cutoff does begin to occur, I am sure that the consumer will ultimately pay the price for the infrastructure change in the form of rate hikes and usage restrictions. Hopefully we have already begun so we are not soon hit with additional sticker shock!