This is the VOA Special English Technology Report, from voaspecialenglish.com | http June eighth was World IPv6 Day — the first major deployment of Internet Protocol version 6. Hundreds of Internet service providers and Web companies tested IPv6 on their websites. This new numbering system for Internet addresses has been available for years. But very few companies have switched to it. Yet the old system could run out of addresses this year because of all the growth in online devices. Computer science professor Doug Szajda at the University of Richmond in Virginia explains: “It’s sort of like the post office of the Internet. It tells you how to get information from one computer to another. Currently, and since around nineteen eighty, the addressing system has been IP version 4. But the problem with that is that we’ve run out of addresses. So it’s almost as if, when a new house is built, you can’t give it an address because you don’t have any more.” IPv4 was designed to handle just over four billion IP addresses. Doug Szajda says that seemed like more than enough. “At the time that IP version 4 was designed, the designers were anticipating perhaps thousands of users of the Internet someday, and certainly thinking that four billion addresses was many more than we would ever need.” Yet now, not just computers but smartphones, cars, televisions, game systems and plenty of other devices all connect to the Internet. Each uses a different IP address. The basic standards for IPv6 …
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Shortage of Internet Addresses, but a Slow Move to New System
