Your number’s up

NOBODY would expect a city water system designed for 1m residents to be able to handle a 1,000-fold increase in population in just a few years. Yet that is what the internet’s fundamental addressing scheme has had to accommodate. When the network was first established there were only a handful of computer centres in America. Instead of choosing a numbering system that could support a few thousand or million addresses, the internet’s designers foresightedly opted for one that could handle 4 billion. But now even that is not enough.

http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11482493