Internet exhausting addresses, but no IPocalypse

With everything from smartphones to internet-linked appliances and cars getting online, the group entrusted with organising the web is running out of the “IP” numbers that identify destinations for digital traffic.

The touted solution to the problem is a switch to a standard called IPv6 that allows trillions of internet addresses, while the current IPv4 standard provides a meager four billion or so.

“The big pool in the sky that gives addresses is going to run out in the next several weeks,” said Google engineer Lorenzo Colitti, who is leading the internet giant’s transition to the new standard.

“In some sense, we are driving toward a wall. We have to do something, and IPv6 is the only real long-term solution.”

The pool in the sky is a fast-draining reservoir of IP addresses maintained by the non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

ICANN has been calling for a change to IPv6 for years but websites and internet service providers have been clinging to the old standard since the birth of the Internet.

“One of the reasons it has taken so long to change is that there is no obvious advantage or killer application for IPv6,” Mr Colitti said.

The number of addresses that IPv6 allows for amounts to 340 “undecillion” (followed by 36 zeroes); enough for a trillion people to each be assigned trillions of IP numbers, according to ICANN chief Rod Beckstrom.

“I guess if we could somehow link an IP address to every atom, we might begin to run into problems,” Mr Beckstrom said of IPv6 during an interview in his office in the Silicon Valley city of Palo Alto.

“As far as thinking about the number of objects that humans own and use, we are pretty safe.”

With about seven billion people on the planet, the IPv4 protocol doesn’t allow for everyone to have a gadget with its own online address.