A One Horse Town.

[heepbigchief]

I would like to respectfully disagree with a statement that WMI has on their website:

http://www.whatismyip.com/faq/what-is-an-ip-address.asp

"IP version 4: Currently used by most network devices. However, with more and more computers accessing the internet, IPv4 addresses are running out quickly. Just like in a city, addresses have to be created for new neighborhoods but, if your neighborhood gets too large, you will have to come up with an entire new pool of addresses. IPv4 is limited to 4,294,967,296 addresses."

Specifically:

"Just like in a city, addresses have to be created for new neighborhoods but, if your neighborhood gets too large, you will have to come up with an entire new pool of addresses."

This isn't so. Numbered or numbered/lettered residential and business addresses start over at each different street name in every neighborhood so it isn't exhaustive.

That's a grid based naming system and is infinite provided that each street has it's own identity.

Such as 100 A St. through 1000 A Street instead of the whole city going from 1+ or 100+ with the only numerical limit being how many pieces of real estate their are in any given city combined with how many apartments (sub addresses) are on that piece of real estate like 100 A Street Apt. A thru 100 A Street Apt. Z (if the building has 26 or less apartments).

Without separate street identities we would be faced with 1 through something like 123456789123456789123456789123456789+ with no end in sight and if the city got bigger you would have to start using exponents.

The premise that WMI asserts in its comparison of real world addresses to IP addresses is based on a city having no specific street names/titles. I suppose one street towns do exist but that is an exception instead of a rule.

If the numbers were issued in succession from 1+ or 100+ in a city the only limit to that would be the human mind not having the capacity to remember all of those separate numbers and the available space on the envelope.

So as you can see, since numbers are infinite, a city would not run out of successive addresses from 1+ or 100+, it's just not feasibile so this works out by the numbers starting over at each different street name.

WMI's analogy brings to mind a city with one endless street like one of those weird puzzles that appears to have 1000 lines but it is only one line since the rule to solving the puzzle is that you can't use a path that you have already taken.

So, regardless if the city had one endless main street or they started at 1+ or 100+ there would be no limit to addresses because successive numbers are infinite, they just not convenient or feasible.

WMI seems to be comparing the finite IPv4 internet IP address system to an infinite grid based naming system when there is no comparison.

This is why IPv4 is dying is because the internet is a city with one main street. If the internet had as many streets as real city blocks IPv4 would start over at each new street.

[wimiadmin]

I definitely agree with your statement. Everything you are saying is absolutely correct.

However, the majority of our visitors who are looking for a definition about IPs aren't tech savvy. So in our explanation, we've tried to keep it as basic as possible.

I'll definitely consider adding your explanation to a more advanced definition page.

[heepbigchief]

Originally Posted by wimiadmin

I definitely agree with your statement. Everything you are saying is absolutely correct.

However, the majority of our visitors who are looking for a definition about IPs aren't tech savvy. So in our explanation, we've tried to keep it as basic as possible.

I'll definitely consider adding your explanation to a more advanced definition page.

Thanks, I may want to edit it a touch though.

If there was only a way to apply "streets" to the internet such as if each domain was a street like .com, .gov, .biz, .info or country codes were streets like .us, .uk, .jp, .ca IPv4 could go on for 1,000+ years.

I think that can be done it's just that the powers that be want nothing to do with a solution.

[wimiadmin]

It would also be nice when they're assigning IPv6 if they gave countries their own block. It would be a ton easier to control the crap traffic we get from China, Russia, and other known spammy type of countries.