What will happen to the Internet tomorrow?
Posted by staff / June 7, 2011
Chances are, you won’t notice a thing wrong with the Internet tomorrow, but on the off chance something goes wrong, here’s the skinny on what’s going down.
Once upon a time, in the dark ages of technology (1977), the Internet protocol addresses (IPs) were set to a standard length of 32-digit binary numbers, which provided what was thought to be a huge number of possibilities.
Well, it’s 2011 and those 4.3 billion addresses have almost been tapped dry, so the companies that have already jumped on board the 128-digit train (IPv6 as opposed to the old IPv4) will be testing out the new addresses tomorrow.
Older DSL and cable modems may have problems accessing sites like Google and Comcast who plan on participating in the test tomorrow, but rather than go all Y2K, we’ll just hope for the best on this one.
Full story at Scientific American.
Photo credit: Fotolia
Oh this will be fun… it always is when the ‘net changes.