How can the internet be running out of IP addresses?

Question

I read an article that says “amassing IP addresses has become a lucrative business because the American internet registry and its counterparts around the world are running out of unique addresses—or at least the current version, IPv4, of which there are about four billion. A switch to the next generation is under way, which will make billions more addresses available, but it will take years to complete.” Why is it so hard to just type a code that creates more addresses?

In: Technology

Answer 1

an ip address is 4x 8 bit numbers. that’s it. exactly how they’re tallied and how stuff works is more complicated – there are entire qualifications half of which are taken up by various forms of subnetting. the highest value you can have in an 8 bit number is 255; it then overflows back to 0. 255(U8BIT) + 1(U8BIT) = 0(U8BIT). The “U” there stands for unsigned, basically meaning it cannot be negative.

In short, the IP (internet protocol) only exists as a set of rules. There isn’t one single IP server that all the others are subservient to or whatever – it’s just a set of protocols that we all follow if we want to communicate concisely. We can’t add an address higher than 255.255.255.255 because (among other reasons lol) that would overflow it by one bit somewhere. that would make an ip address 3x 8 bits and 1x 9 bits. How can you tell it’s either one just by receiving the data over a data line? you wouldn’t know where to stop reading the address considering that data sent over these lines is literally just a series of numbers.

this is a much condensed version of things so be sure to reply and tell me what you’d like for me to elaborate on – there’s no way the above two paragraphs can be enough for you to understand from scratch.

also, we don’t give every single device an ip address. we use something called NAT to facilitate ip connectivity on multiple devices connected to one gateway which has only one ip address. if we gave every device an ip address and didn’t subnet anything we would probably have run out before the year two thousand.