No More Room on Internet by February 2nd – The IPcalypse

The IPcalypse will hit on February 2nd 2011 around 4 a.m.

That’s when the Internet will run out of its current version of IP addresses according to ISP – Hurricane Electric.

That figure is based on the current rate of about one million addresses every four hours.

Hurricane Electric has launched Twitter and Facebook accounts that count down to what it has termed the “IPcalypse.”

As you are probably aware – each device that is connected to the Internet gets a unique code called an IP address – you can check to see what yours is here.

The current system, IPv4, supports about 4 billion individual IPv4 addresses and that point has almost been reached.

Before you start panic hoarding IP addresses there is already a system waiting in the wings called IPv6. This new system uses letters and numbers so that it can handle 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses. Should be enough for a while eh?

Hurricane Electric’s doomsday campaign is to encourage other Internet service providers to move over to IPv6. Fortunately IPv4 and IPv6 can coexist during the transition despite being largely incompatible.

Software and hardware developers are making sure that all goes well and most operating systems install support for IPv6 by default.