Sometime in July 2015, the internet ran out of new IDs, according to the American Registry for Internet Numbers, one of five organizations worldwide in charge of handing out IP addresses. IP addresses are those numbers you see in your browser sometimes, or that you have to type to log into your wireless router. They look something like “74.125.224.72.”
These addresses identify every device on the complex system that is the internet. The formal definition is
a unique string of numbers separated by periods that identifies each computer using the Internet Protocol to communicate over a network.
For a more detailed but still easy-to-understand explanation of what IP addresses are and what they do, here’s a great website you can check out: http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip-address.
With the original format, about 4.3 billion combinations were possible. Seems like that would be enough to last awhile, right? And yet, we’ve run fresh out of new ones.
No worries though – a new system is already being rolled out, and the number of combinations the new format will make possible is, to be exact,
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456.
That’s over 340 undecillion (yup – undecillion is a thing)! Let’s see how long we can make that last.
