Many of our readers are undoubtedly familiar with the basics of IP addresses: they provide a network address with which Internet traffic is reliably forwarded to your PC, smartphone or other device. The problem, however, is that almost no IP addresses are available on the Internet.

IPv4 is the current flagship Internet Protocol (IP) technology. Everyone connected to the Internet is assigned an IP address of up to 12 digits. IPv4 technology enables about 4 billion unique IP addresses. And not all IP addresses are created equal: there are "classes" of IP addresses - some for public use (usually to identify servers on the web) and others for personal use (such as devices that are connected to your home network)) . For example, the IP address for Google.com is comparable to a typical Netgear router (eg your home).

Google's public IP address appears at 66.102.7.99 when typed and is accessed on the Netgear router 192.168.1.1 by default on the network. "192." IP blocks, known as "Class C", are for private use and are generally intended for use with NAT (Network Address Translation). Allow multiple devices to operate on the same network point access point (multiple ideas) behind a PC that connects to the Internet over a Wi-Fi network.

Class C addresses can be reused because they only exist on a private network. The Google.com IP address, however, is "class A" because it is "66". Class A cannot normally be reused, starting with the address, which eventually leads to the completion of the available address space as more IP addresses are requested and used.


Sadly the time is now! At the rate at which new IP addresses are claimed, the shared public IPv4 address space - a pool of all available IPv4 addresses - can be completely emptied in a week.

No, that doesn't mean the internet is over.

Some clever people predicted this problem of IPv4 and designed IPv6 (don't ask what happened to v5) for ever larger address space (i.e., it could support longer IP addresses). This may allow more IP addresses - a lot more). This site supports more IP addresses than IPv6. Google has already reversed the switch on many of its services, and is quietly rolling out IPV6 for some ISP subscribers. The latest operating systems provide at least basic IPv6 support. The Internet Society has more questions about IPv6 and how to enable it on your PC.

Hopefully the infection went so smoothly that no one noticed ... until there are letters until they can find your IP address! That's right, only IP addresses are getting longer, but your IP address will now be hexadecimal. You noticed in the math class, right?