Part One of this series discussed the push toward IPv6. The drive to IPv6, the newer Internet communications protocol, appears to be driven by major networking vendors. Their contention is that we’re ...

In addition to IPv4 (often written as just IP), there is IP version 6 (IPv6). IPv6 was developed as IPng (“IP:The Next Generation” because the developers were supposedly fans of the TV show “Star Trek ...

We just saw that the mask determines where the boundary between the network and host portions of the IP address lies. This boundary is important: If it is set too far to the right, there are lots of ...

In the early 1990s, internet engineers sounded the alarm: the pool of numeric addresses that identify every device online was not infinite. IPv4, the fourth version of the Internet Protocol, used ...

Twenty years ago, the fastest Internet backbone links were 1.5Mbps. Today we argue whether that’s a fast enough minimum to connect home users. In 1993, 1.3 million machines were connected to the ...

Michael Fry receives funding from ARC. If you’re the sort of person who relies on the internet every day, you’ll maybe have twitched slightly on hearing rumours that the world is running out of ...

In April, ARIN, the (North) American Registry for Internet Numbers, announced that it had reached “phase 4” of its IPv4 countdown plan, with fewer than 17 million IPv4 addresses remaining. There is no ...

The organisation responsible for allocating new IP addresses across in Europe, the Middle East and parts of central Asia says it has finally run out of IPv4 addresses. IPv4 addresses are the 32-bit ...

On February 3, it finally happened: the clock ran out on the Internet as we know it. That was the day that the stash of Internet protocol addresses that are used to identify and locate computers ...