Youve probably read about a wondrous future in which everything from PCs and PDAs to cell phones, automobiles, and home appliances are connected to the Internet. Imagine: Youre on a business trip, and your PDA alerts you that someone is at the door of your home, thousands of miles away. You check your front door Webcam, open the door to let a FedEx guy deliver a package, and then lock the door after he leaves—all wirelessly.
Sounds great, but theres one hitch: Each device needs its own IP address to connect and identify itself to the rest of the Internet. And there may not be enough addresses to go around.
Back in the 1980s, it was almost inconceivable that more than 4 billion available IP addresses, used to identify individual devices, would ever run out. In fact, these addresses will run out probably sometime in the next decade.
To read the full article, go to PC Magazine.