If you haven’t already heard the internet is quickly running out of IP Addresses. A solution to this problem has been under deliberation for years on how many IPs should be added and when it will be required for the internet to use the new standard.
You may rest assured that if you are hosting your websites at Incantrix we have already begun the process to switch to the new IPv6 standard up from IPv4 (ex: 192.168.1.1) which allowed 4,294,967,296 IP addresses when this was decided back in 1980, of course at the time programmers/engineers thought this would be more than enough for thousands of computer networks in the world.
With the recent exploding market of smart phones there has been a need to have the new standard of IPv6 sooner than expected; in February 2010, the International Telecommunications Union announced that the number of cell phones worldwide is now over 4.6 billion with “smart phones” . These are phones that require a unique IP address. Smart phone usage is growing by thousands every month; in the first half of 2010 vendors shipped a total of 119.4 MILLION smart phones, an increase of 55.5% over the first half of 2009.
So when the rollout of IPv6 is complete there will be just about 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 IP addresses. Gosh, this should get us where we want to be. :)