The internet. Few of us know much about this mysterious entity. The average person's relationship with the Internet is as simple as click and go, writes Louis Lepper of Logan Park High School.
Little would someone know that the internet is a whole world of complexity and detail. This lack of knowledge can be problematic, especially when something happens to go wrong.
The image of simplicity can give the people in charge a false impression. Right now, the internet is in danger of becoming fragmented and inaccessible, and if we don't educate and act on our knowledge, the results could be dire.
In around the year 1998, something went wrong, or, to put it more correctly, we realised that something would eventually go wrong.
The problem was the number of internet addresses. Every computer, printer, cell phone, or device needs one.
Back when the internet was created, sometime in the 1980s, not a single person predicted its eventual growth.
The original version of the internet ran off IPV4 (Internet Protocol Version 4), which catered to approximately 4.3 billion addresses. Computer scientists soon realised that with the rapid growth of the internet, we would be running out of addresses sometime around 2023, or even a little later.
These scientists were wrong, and, in the last year or two, we realised that we would be running out of IP (Internet Protocol) addresses in a very short amount of time. The issue of IPV4 exhaustion was tackled in 1998, when the newer version of the Internet Protocol was created; 'IPV6'.
As IPV6 is not backwards compatible with IPV4, it requires all of the internet to switch to it. Although newer computers can be on the IPV4 Internet, and the IPV6 Internet at the same time, all internet infrastructure, such as routers or servers need to be upgraded or replaced in order to support IPV6.
Think of it as a world where everyone has letterboxes with a triangle slot, that can have triangle shaped packages placed in them. If a new postal system came about, where letterboxes had circular holes, then delivering packages between the two would be problematic. This is an over simplification, but it makes a good analogy for part of the issue.
The transition to IPV6 made migration to the new internet very slow, as managers of businesses and corporations saw no need to pay reasonably large amounts of money to support this new internet, when their current internet was working.
The lack of knowledge about the internet meant that although changes had to be made, they were not.
David Conrad, the general manager of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) acknowledged, "I suspect we are actually beyond a reasonable time frame where there won't be some disruption. Now it's more a question of how much."
On the third of February 2011, the IANA ran out of addresses.
IANA had the global address pool of internet addresses. On April 15, APNIC ran out of addresses. APNIC is our regional address provider. Now that all of our IPV4 address allocators are out, there are only a small number of addresses left.
Outside the community of people who work on the internet, awareness of this shortage is limited. If the whole world is going to switch to IPV6 (which it needs to), we should have been getting corporations to solve this problem before it becomes a problem.
As stated earlier, it is already too late to fix this without seeing some disruption. How much, and the amount of damage that is might cause, is uncertain.
When it comes to crunch time, the people that are going to be affected include you. You use the internet every day. Imagine trying to sign up for an internet connection and being turned down due to lack of addresses. If we act now, we'll hopefully be able to continue to enjoy a rich and prosperous internet driven age.
When governments are making major decisions regarding our national internet, get informed.
When the world's internet faces a crisis, get informed, and express your opinion so that changes can be made.
When making decisions about your internet, be informed about what you're getting, and it's suitability for the future.
If we take away the lack of knowledge, things can only get better.
- Louis Lepper is a Year 13 student at Logan Park High School
