The mayans predicted the end of the world in 2012. We don’t know what’s the deal with this prediction in real life but on the Internet this prophecy means that hte number of IP addresses will ran out.

A while ago, internet experts issued a warning saying that out of the 4 billion combinations only 6% are still available and these percentages might be extinct in less than 1 year

The vice president of Google, Vince Cerf, the one that helped to create the  modern Internet rebrings this issue into attention announcing that the last IP addresses will be allotted next year.

The first country that announced that it’s facing this issue is England, a very unpleasant aspect for a country that played a key role in the development of the Internet.

The only hope to avoid this problem is to implement a new infrastructure, named IPv6, which, besides teh fact that itw ill increase the number of IP addresses it will also increase the number of supported bits, from 32 to 128.

According to Cerf, IPv6 will be able to host up to 340 billion of billion of billion IP addresses compared to 4.3 billion the current IPv4 infrastructure hosts.

IPv6 is however a very hard to implement platform, because the entire planet has to move to the nwe system.

“We need to be able to communicate with every person on this Earth that is connected to the Internet. If Europe does not implement the IPv6 protocol they will not be able to communicate with the rest of the world and this is a mistake.”

If indeed the day will come when IP addresses will no longer be available, the consequences will be awful, according to researchers.

Not only the expansion of the Internet is going to be stopped, but it’s possible that existent IP addresses will be sold to the highest bidder, creating pressure and tension throughout the Web.