Although 4 billion addresses seemed near infinite in 1974, by the early 1990s it was already evident that the Internet would soon run out of IP (IPv4) addresses, necessary for computers to be connected to the Internet. Work on the next generation of IP, IPv6, was to increase the number of routable network addresses from 32-bit (232, or 4 billion) to 128-bit (or 2128 or 3.4×1029 billion) addresses. Technical fixes managed to extend the lifetime of IPv4, but over the last few years the need to move to IPv6 has become pressing, and adoption is now happening faster.
Growth and change
Over the last two decades, the emergence of social networks, the increasing availability of Internet streaming media, and the integration of mobile telephone networks with the Internet have hugely increased demand for Internet capacity. Such demand will require large investments to meet, but probably without any radical rethink of the Internet’s architecture. The number of Internet-connected devices is growing significantly, but we can assume that it would increase only to a small multiple of the world’s population. So even if the protocols that govern how devices connect to the Internet had to change to cope with demand, this could be achieved within only a few years.
The ability to monitor the activities of people—with or without their knowledge—is one important outcome of so many people so frequently connected to the network. The ability by unauthorized individuals to hack into private systems, to obtain private data or damage operations, are very worrying developments. The advances in computer and network security needed require massive research and development, and new legal and regulatory powers. And an even more disruptive development now looms: the Internet of Things.
Increasingly, devices and equipment found in all aspects of our lives may incorporate sensors and actuators that can be operated remotely. The estimated number of devices to be network-connected is much larger: as many as hundreds of billions within ten years. Cars (for navigation or automated driving), home appliances (for automation, security), devices on the national power grid (monitoring and error correction), smart buildings (temperature or humidity control, security), smart cities (traffic control, services supply, waste management), wearable and implanted medical devices, and so on.
