In September 2015 the American Registry for Internet Numbers announced they had run out of IPv4 addresses. Many people may not know and appreciate the significance of this and how it may effect the way they connect to the internet in the future.

To send a letter to your friend on the other side of the world, you require their address, which must be unique if you want at least some surety of it getting there. Fortunately the system we employ generally means it is unlikely we’ll run out of physical addresses, however, you can see that there would be a limited number of zip codes/post codes or any other regional codes.

192.168.1.1 (example of a ‘Private’ ip address)

The previous example IP Version 4 (IPv4) address is comprised of four ‘octets’, so called because they contain eight binary (on or off) bits. 8 bits with 2 states gives a total possible number of permutations of 256. 4 Octets leads to a total available amount of addresses globally of 4,294,967,296.

This may seem like a large number, but when you consider the fact that in 2011 the global population was 7 Billion and according to internetlivestats.com there are 3 Billion people with an internet connection it is continually growing. Unfortunately, due to arguably a lack of foresight in the beginnings of the internet, there are huge ranges of ip addresses which are allocated to organisations, governments and reserved addresses (for testing and other IP functions).

The realisation that IP addresses were going to run out was established early on, and there have been several techniques which have helped to slow down the rate of decline. At home and at work you may connect to the internet through a router. This router can when using a technique called Network Address Translation (NAT) have a single IP address which is used by all devices connecting to the internet.

The internet is gradually moving towards IPv6. This, unlike the total 32 bits of an IPv4 address has 128 bits giving a total of 3.4×1038 (340 undecillion), significantly larger. There are enough IPv6 addresses for 6.67×1023 for every square meter on earth. A downside of this is that the relatively user friendly and easy to remember 4 octets of numbers has been replaced with 32 hexadecimal characters, e.g: fe80:0000:0000:0000:2000:0aff:fea7:0f7c. This can be compressed by removing the large blocks of zeroes as follows:fe80::2000:aff:fea7:f7c, although this doesn’t help.

IPv4 addresses were also never seen as easy enough for people to generally remember, the world wide web would not have taken off with quite the same speed if we had to remember the IP address for every website we frequent. Fortunately we make use of a system called DNS (Domain Name System) so that when we type “www.wordpress.com” into our browser, it can retrieve web files from an server with an IP address.

IPv6 with it’s huge pool of IP addresses will remove the need for NAT, as such we will likely see a return to when every address within a private (e.g. home) network is reachable from the internet. For many, this is a security issue, as there is one less layer to penetrate for those wishing to hack a network. However, with the growth of home devices being on the internet (for example, Google’s Nest for home heating can be controlled remotely) or IP cameras, there will be a growing need to access devices and services remotely. Rather than requiring IP address knowledge there has and will continue to be a growth in a service called Dynamic DNS.

Dynamic DNS (DDNS) allows users to access these devices by a domain name instead of an IP address. The best bit of DDNS is that it will automatically point to the correct IP address even when it has been changed. With IPv6 becoming more prevalent and the added challenge of remembering it this will become crucial. There are a variety of DDNS providers who offer a domain name which you can use for this purpose, such as Now-IP.com’s free DDNS service which supports IPv6. As an example, if I want to login to an IP webcam at home to check on my cats, I could type FuturetechnophilesCam.now-ip.net instead of in the future a long, complex, and potentially changing IPv6 address.

In summary, we are finally as an internet community having to face a fundamental and necessary shift in how the internet works. Unfortunately it is towards a solution which as elegant as it is functionally, is also a lot more difficult to work with. However, with growing services such as DDNS and other’s sure to emerge, we will likely succeed.