The Internet is one step closer to running out of addresses on Tuesday, after the international organization tasked with handing out Internet protocol addresses assigned two of the seven remaining blocks.
Early on Tuesday, the organization that oversees net addresses in the Asia Pacific region, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), requested two blocks of Internet protocol (IP) addresses, each comprising about 16 million, from the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA).
Foreseeing the decline of addresses, the IANA had reserved five blocks, known as /8s, which will now be handed out to five regional agencies across the world in mid-March. The registries will then be able to hand out domain names as they see fit.
This means the Internet could run out of addresses as early as Sept. 2011, Axel Pawlik, the managing director of European IP Addresses (RIPE), the organization charged with overseeing Internet registries in Europe told the BBC.
The Internet was developed on version 4 of the Internet Protocol (IPv4) and was designed in 1986 by Vint Cerf, who in an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald said it was his "fault" that addresses on the world's biggest network are dwindling.
"I thought it was an experiment and I thought that 4.3 billion [addresses] would be enough to do an experiment," Cerf told The Sydney Morning Herald.
Cerf, who now works for Google as its chief Internet evangelist, said he didn't know his experiment wouldn't end.
The Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), one of five not-for-profit internet registries, urged all members of the Internet industry in a press release Tuesday to move forward with a new registry system to sustain the growth of the Internet.
"APNIC reiterates that IPv6 is the only means available for the sustained ongoing growth of the Internet, and urges all Members of the Internet industry to move quickly towards its deployment."
The IPv6 registry system, which will get a 24 hour test drive on June 8, 2011 by companies such as Google, Facebook and Yahoo is meant to urge the rest of the world to update their services to the IPv6 system before an official transition period.
Lorenzo Colitti, a network engineer for Google, calmed fears in a blog post saying most Internet users won't "need to do anything special to prepare" for the switch and that 99.95 per cent of users will be unaffected when IPv6 goes mainstream.
However, there could be problems with connectivity, said Colitti, if home network devices are not configured properly.
