--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "sparaig" <LEnglish5@...> wrote:
> Well, they haven't quite run out. THere's still millions of unused addresses > available. The allocation of new sets of addresses past a certain level of > the hierarchy, has run out. I.E. (and this is really primitive understanding > on my part): the www part of the www.xxx.yyy.zzz address space has been > filled in. There's still plenty of addresses left (for a little while) in the > yyy.zzz parts of each of them. The xxx etc stand for numbers between 0 and > 255, so in theory there are 256 x 256 x256 x256 (or about 4 billion) IP > addresses total, but reserved numbers in each of those positions means there > are somewhat less than that which can be used by the general public. > > The next generation of IP addresses, IPv6, have the form > ssss.tttt.uuuu.vvvv.wwww.xxxx.yyyy.zzzz where each block can range from 0 to > 65,535 or there are theoretically 65,536 x 64,536 x... (or > 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456) possible addresses > available. > > The way those addresses are divvied is very complicated, but the bottom line > is that they don't expect IPv6 addresses to run out until we have a > multi-galaxy civilization to provide addresses to. > > > L Thanks - I was relying on reports from last year that they would have run out of IP4 addresses by now. Unless the light speed barrier is possible to break, communication in even a single galaxy-wide civilisation will be very slow.
