Your number's up: Economist

Illustration by Belle Mellor

Networking: The internet will run out of addresses unless a new numbering system is adopted. After years of inaction, there are now signs of progress

NOBODY would expect a city water system designed for 1m residents to be able to handle a 1,000-fold increase in population in just a few years. Yet that is what the internet's fundamental addressing scheme has had to accommodate. When the network was first established there were only a handful of computer centres in America. Instead of choosing a numbering system that could support a few thousand or million addresses, the internet's designers foresightedly opted for one that could handle 4 billion. But now even that is not enough.

The addressing system, called internet protocol version 4 (IPv4), cannot keep up with the flood of computers, mobile phones, hand-held gadgets, games consoles and even cars and refrigerators flooding onto the network. Nearly 85% of available addresses are already in use; if this trend continues they will run out by 2011, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a think-tank for rich countries, warned in May.

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