Countdown To Digital Doomsday

Did you ever imagine a Doomsday scenario?Well,it may become a reality in atleast the virtual world.Get ready for the Digital Doomsday.For in around 1,273 days there will be web chaos in the world as we run out of Internet addresses.

In numbers speak,more than 85 per cent of the available addresses have already been allocated and the rest will run out by 2011, according to a prediction by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The Internet addresses that are being talked about are not the normal web addresses that we type in a browser.These are the numerical Internet protocol addresses that denote the individual devices connected to the Internet.These form the basis of our everyday activities such as online communications,email,chatting and streaming video.

when you type in something called the domain name say www.google.com the browser sends a query to the Domain Name Server(DNS) asking from it the IP Address for that domain name.The DNS returns the IP address to the browser say 172.19.64.14 and the browser goes to Google's website using the IP Address as the reference point.

When the current IP address scheme called as the Internet Protocol version 4(IPv4),was introduced in 1981,there were just around 500 computers connected to the internet.The then address makers allowed for upto 4 billion addresses,thinking that this would be more than enough and would last forever with no need to worry about all of them being taken.Now just 30 years on they seem to be used up already.

Now the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF),a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet,is already prepared for the doomsday.It has devised a replacement system, called IPv6, more than a decade ago, providing enough addresses for billions upon billions of devices.

But the catch here is that the new system is not really compatible with the Internet of today. So if Yahoo wants to support IPv6 then it would not have to only build a new IPv6 webservice,but also get new domain names,servers and bandwidth.And the costs run into billions!

For those interested in this countdown to the Internet Doomsday,just go to http://penrose.uk6x.com.