4,294,967,296 Isn't Big Enough!

by Jim Brain

Reprinted from Commodore World Issue #6

One of the reasons that a successor to the IP protocol is being developed concerns the IP address, a 32-bit number that uniquely identifies each machine connected to the Internet. While 32 bits provides a unique numerical address for over 4.2 billion machines, researchers claim that the numbers will run out sometime in mid-1995. Now, this doesn't mean that there'll be 4.2 billion machines connected to the Internet in mid-1995. Because the Internet Network Information Center (InterNIC) assigns IP addresses in groups, not all addresses in a group are used. Therefore, the InterNIC will run out of groups of numbers to assign in mid-1995. This is indeed a problem, thus new protocols being developed will have much larger address sizes.

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