In addition to IPv4 (often written as just IP), there is IP version 6 (IPv6). IPv6 was developed as IPng (“IP:The Next Generation” because the developers were supposedly fans of the TV show “Star Trek ...

The format of an IP address in the traditional 32-bit version of the IP protocol. For the foreseeable future, IPv4 will co-exist with the newer IPv6 version (see IPv6). IPv4 uses a "dotted decimal" ...

We've known we would run out of IPv4 addresses since 1981, when the Internet Protocol was standardized. The numbers dictate that there will never be more than 4,294,967,296 different IPv4 addresses.

In the early 1990s, internet engineers sounded the alarm: the pool of numeric addresses that identify every device online was not infinite. IPv4, the fourth version of the Internet Protocol, used ...

A possible fix arrived in December 1995 in the form of RFC 1883, the first definition of IPv6, the planned successor to IPv4.

Migration has been gradual, but the move to IPv6 could speed up with IPv4 addresses running out The argument about how best to upgrade the Internet’s main communications protocol raged in the Internet ...

Twenty years ago, the fastest Internet backbone links were 1.5Mbps. Today we argue whether that’s a fast enough minimum to connect home users. In 1993, 1.3 million machines were connected to the ...

We just saw that the mask determines where the boundary between the network and host portions of the IP address lies. This boundary is important: If it is set too far to the right, there are lots of ...

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The various Internet management groups made it official this morning. We're now out of Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) Internet address blocks. The final five blocks of IPv4 addresses were given ...