The Internet is starting to get full.

That the Internet is still growing isn’t news. At least that is what you would think. It seems that the Internet Service Providers aren’t thinking of this too much. With the current growth of new Internet users the Internet is starting to get full, especially with upcoming markets with giants like China.

This warning comes from Vint Cerf; one of the founders of the current Internet Protocols and he says that it can happen around 2010 that people can’t enter the Internet anymore with new devices like servers, pda’s and even MP3 players.

The system that is now used for providing IP addresses is IPv4 and it provides room for four billion IP’s. This system creates IP’s with 12 numbers in it. The system that can solve the growth problem is IPv6 which was developed about 10 years ago. This “new” system can create 340 trillion new IP addresses but it is still not implemented all over the world.

Vint Cerf says in his interview with the BBC that the reason for this is that the customers (ISP’s) haven’t asked for it and that this why it isn’t implemented yet.  The main reason why they haven’t asked for this is because the IPv6 and IPv4 systems are not compatible so ISP’s need to run two parallel systems which will ad additional costs.

You can find the interview with more IPv6 developments at the BBC News site.