This is the IPv4 count down. We only have a couple of days left on IPv4 and then it will be IPv6.
On February 2 around 4 a.m., the Internet will run out of its current version of IP addresses. At least that’s what one Internet Service Provider is predicting based on a 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.”
Every device that is connected to the Internet gets a unique code called an IP address (it looks like this). The current system, IPv4, only supports about 4 billion individual IPv4 addresses.
Fortunately, some smart folks foresaw this problem long before we did and invented IPv6, a system that invokes both letters and digits to handle 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses (shall we just call it “a zillion?”).
