We're Doomed

[Starbuck_Jones]

There are roughly 4.3 billion ip addresses. There are certain range of numbers that are never used publicly, that most people at home use called private ip addresses. These are the familar addresses we see all the time that our routers use like 192.168.x.x.

With 6.7+ billion people, not everyone can have their own phone number, and every device that gets online can consume one. So your home network has one, your 3g phone uses one, your smart fridge that orders you milk and prints coupons has one etc... So some people and businesses can consume a lot of numbers. Early on, companies like GE and Ford were able to buy HUGE swaths of ip addresses for next to nothing. Like /8 or 'block 8'. Thats 16.8 MILLION addresses. This was during the days of when Bill Gates reportedly said no computer would ever need more than 640k of ram and HP's Ken Olsen saying that there is no reason for anyone to have a computer in their home.

So long story of short sightedness the fix is ipv6. So we move from a 32bit address to a 128bit one. A thing to remember about 'bits' is that each one doubles the capacity. so a 33 bit address would have double that of a 32. a 34bit address would have double the 33 and 4x the 32. So when we hit the 128bit mark its stupid sauce what the number is. Were looking at approximately 340 undecillion or 3.4×10^38 numbers.

Lets break that number down with maths. The earth has a little more than 510 million square KM of surface area, land and water combined. This is about 149 million for land only. That gives us.

149 000 000 (square kilometers) = 1.49 × 10^14 square meters
149 000 000 (square kilometers) = 1.49 × 10^18 square centimeters
149 000 000 (square kilometers) = 1.49 × 10^20 square millimeters

Humm. 1.49 x 10^20 if we assign an ipv6 address to every square millimeter of land and were not even close to the 3.4×10^38 addresses ipv6 provides. Even if we go to the square nanometer were only at 1.49 × 10^32 with a whole lot more numbers left over to sell to the chinese.

If we add in the water surface area were only at 5.1x 10^32 numbers used. That lets us actually assign 667,000 addresses to each square nanometer of surface area of the entire earth.

So in the name of short sighted leaders, Im going to say we wont run out of these numbers... ever.