We all know that the Internet is growing fast, but do we really realize just how fast?

The Internet, at least in the way a big part of it is wired, may just prove too small for the billions of gadgets trying to surf it in about 18 months’ time, according to a report by CNN. It won’t disappear altogether; it’s just that there will be so many devices trying to navigate the Internet that not all of them will be able to connect to it in the first place.

You see, devices that connect to the World Wide Web are assigned what are called IP addresses, which uniquely identify each and every single object interacting in the Internet – servers, websites, computers, mobile phones, iPads, whatever. Each IP address is made up of four numbers, each between zero to 255.

The problem with this, for example, is that this scheme only allows around 4.29 billion unique IP addresses (do the math yourself: 255 x 255 x 255 x 255), which means that only that many objects can “exist” in the Internet. While 4.29 billion might have seemed like an astronomical number during the infancy of the Internet back in the 1970′s, right now, it’s no surprise. Just about everything needs to connect to the Internet these days: from laptops to smartphones to automobiles to wristwatches to gaming consoles.

There is a functional replacement, however: IPv6 (the “classic” scheme described above is known as IPv4). IPv6 allows for trillions of fresh new IP addresses in addition to the IPv4 protocol, but people and companies are somewhat reluctant to take it up because of costs and uncertainty. If we can manage to switch over to the IPv6 protocol in time, however, we might just be able to forego such a Millennium Bug-like catastrophe.

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