New Protocol to Have More Addresses
Even Internet pioneers have computer problems. Speaking to the Los Angeles chapter of the Internet Society last week, Vint Cerf had trouble loading a presentation on his laptop.
“How many engineers does it take to get Bill Gates’ software to wake up?” he asked, to a room full of guffaws at the Los Angeles Airport Marriott.
Cerf, who co-created Internet protocol--the language of the Net--in the early 1970s, made several predictions about the Internet’s future. Half of the world’s population will be online by 2010, he said, but by then there will be more devices on the Net than people.
There may be a problem, however. Each of those devices--ranging from cell phones to refrigerators--will need an Internet address. But the current version of Internet protocol has room for only 4.2 billion addresses at most, which will certainly be used up within a decade, Cerf said. A version of Internet protocol currently under development can accommodate 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses.
