I/P Addresses?

Question

With our ever expanding population and growth of technology will we ever run out of I/P addresses?

Answer 1

Yes, we already have. Without complex mathematic tools to break down the IP's (such as subnet masking, variable length subnet masking and CIDR) we would have exhausted the use of IP addresses years ago. There was some vague description of having enough IP addresses to cover all the mountains in the World which it turns out is simply not enough, the present number is 4 billion addresses (2 to the 32) and the population of the planet is 6.6 billion, people also need more than one IP each, I have at least 3 in my home.



At present there are predictions that by 2010 a standard household will have 10 or more IP addresses, even with things like subnet masking we'd still be out of IP addresses abd routing tables would be so big the internet would slow down to a halt... The plan is to introduce IPv6 which is a hex based numbering system which based on the last journal I read "will have enough IP addresses for every star in the universe", in other words there will be no limit to the number of IP addresses.



I'm CCNA certified and wrote at least 3 presentations on why we should switch over to IPv6 sooner rather than later at university, theres links to IPv6 and the number of IP addresses available in my sources.

Answer 2

In the current IP scheme IPv4 we are using 32 bit addresses - so the 192.168.1.1 address is 32 bits of information. This limits the usable numbers to 4.2 billion. ARPnet has designated some areas of the ip space reserved.

private ip spaces are

192.168.x.x

172.16.x.x

10.10.x.x

and

127.0.0.x

so yes we will run out of the traditional ip addresses but that is why IPv6 was suggested.



IPv6 which has been coming for 4 years or so is in the form 2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7334 uses 128bit addresses which makes the possible combinations absurdly large. This should prevent us from having to redo the ip space for a hundred years or so.

Answer 3

It's sort of a "yes and no" answer. Yes in the sense that IPs are based on a protocol that limits how many numbers are available to us (4,294,967,296 IPs, according to Wikipedia). This protocol is called IPv4. Once we run out of numbers we have to come up with more numbers. So, the "no" part of answer is that we can create a different protocol to make more numbers available to us. This protocol is IPv6.



So, "yes" the protocol limits the numbers, but "no" because we can just create a different protocol.

Answer 4

Well, IPv4 only uses 32-bit (4-byte) addresses, which limits the address space to 4,294,967,296 (256 x 256 x 256 x 256) possible unique addresses (Check it on wikipedia if you want). I think that when we begin to feel the ip address shortage somebody will change the way they work and make them bigger or something like that.

Answer 5

No. The current method is the use of 4 sets of 3 numbers which gives us 1,000,000,000,000 (1000 x 1000 x 1000 x 1000) possible combinations of IP adresses. Then if you add the alphabet into that as well the possibilties for combination run into the trillions.

Answer 6

That is why MS is pushing IPv6, that gives more ip addresses.

Answer 7

no we will not cause we can use any no.