The Race to Address a Net Crisis

As 360 million people worldwide trip happily through cyberspace--buying books, sending e-mail and checking stock prices--a crisis is quietly building that threatens to slam the brakes on the Internet’s phenomenal growth.

The problem is rooted in the computer network’s very popularity. Each device connected to the Internet must be identified by a unique string of numbers, or “address,” so any two computers can find each other over the Net.

But just as the proliferation of fax machines, pagers, wireless phones and personal computers triggered a shortage of phone numbers and spawned a wave of new area codes, heavy use of the Internet is rapidly draining the supply of numerical Internet addresses.

Of the world’s 4.2 billion potential Internet addresses, there could be only a few hundred million left to be taken. And with the Internet doubling in size every nine months, the remaining Internet addresses are rapidly being exhausted.

Technologists fear the Net will soon reach its absolute capacity and become “frozen in time,” said Vint Cerf, who in the early 1970s co-wrote the original Internet language, known as IPv4, which is now dangerously overloaded.

Without more Internet addresses, billions of people in China, India and other countries that came relatively late to the Internet party would be unable to get the simple dial-up computer connections that Americans take for granted.

That’s because in the brief history of the Internet, the U.S. and Canada have led an Internet land grab by snapping up about 800 million addresses.

When the Internet began in the early 1970s, the U.S. government and university researchers were the only ones using the Internet, and they took as many addresses as they wanted. By the mid-1980s, businesses and consumers were beginning to use the Internet. And then by the mid-1990s, the creation of Netscape’s Web browser and the emergence of companies like Amazon.com helped trigger the worldwide Internet frenzy.

Today, there are 2.6 Internet addresses for every person in North America. But in Asia, only 82 million Internet addresses have been reserved, or one for every 43 people. “It has created a certain amount of inequity,” said Bob Hinden, an Internet protocol specialist for cell phone giant Nokia Corp.

This Internet number crunch has mobilized a loose-knit band of hundreds of computer scientists from the U.S., Asia and Europe. With the frenzy of environmentalists trying to save the ozone layer, these members of the Internet Engineering Task Force are rewriting the underlying language of the Net. “It’s a little like changing the airplane engines when you’re still in the air,” said Cerf, 57, now senior vice president for Internet architecture and technology at telecommunications giant WorldCom Inc.

Some of these Internet wizards teach at universities, others are employed by technology powerhouses such as IBM or Nokia. Many of them helped create the Internet and now feel a responsibility to fix it. Most of their work is done in massive e-mail discussion groups.

They believe they have a solution. A new Internet language, dubbed IPv6, has the potential of multiplying potential Internet addresses by a factor of 80 octillion, or 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

The hope is that final tests prove them right and that a new Internet protocol can be launched within a couple of years.

“We’re saving the Internet for future generations,” said Bob Fink, a 59-year-old computer network researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley lab, who is helping to lead the overhaul. “I may be a little bit naive here, but I believe China will emerge . . . in a democratic way because of the Internet. That’s an important thing to do.”

Groups Collaborated on Possible Solutions

Thirty years ago when the Internet was in its infancy, worrying about billions of users would have seemed preposterous. The original IPv4 version was devised by Cerf, then a Stanford professor, and Bob Kahn, director of information processing techniques for the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. Their design ensured that tiny packets of information could make their way across the many computer networks that constitute the Internet and reach their final destination.

With IPv4, each machine tapping into the Internet has its own numerical address made up of a combination of 32 zeros and ones. But for technical reasons the possible 4.2 billion numerical combinations can’t all be used as addresses. For example, Internet addresses must be doled out in blocks of two, four, eight, 16, 32 and other numbers that are a power of two. Therefore, if a company needs 33 Internet addresses, it will get a block of 64, and 31 of them will be wasted. Experts believe that 30% to 70% of all potential addresses will go unused.

Companies and consumers typically get their addresses from Internet service providers, such as EarthLink Network, who in turn receive their allocations from three regional Internet registries that serve the Americas, Asia and Europe.

Almost immediately after the impending shortage was discovered, groups of volunteers began collaborating on different solutions. Three competing blueprints soon emerged for a new Internet protocol.

One group backed software maker Novell and wanted this new protocol built upon the foundation of the company’s PC networking software. Another proposal came from Internet experts at the National Bureau of Standards, who tossed out IPv4 altogether and created a new Internet architecture almost from scratch.

But after two years of “energetic design competition,” a design based on IPv4 itself emerged, Fink said. One advantage was that IPv4 had an entrenched base of hundreds of influential users from universities and federal agencies who were anxious to help with the design and to stick with what they knew. Their blueprint came to be known as IPv6.

The most important feature of IPv6 is that it expands each Internet address from 32 to 128 digits. This overhaul will provide enough Internet space for “as long as we’re networking on this planet,” said Hinden, the Nokia engineer.

IPv6 is being tested on 20 computer networks at research centers and Internet service providers.

The next step was to get hardware and software companies to embrace the new IPv6 protocol.

After intense lobbying from Cerf and others, mobile phone manufacturers agreed to incorporate IPv6 in their next generation of cell phones. “Having a mobile phone without a unique [Internet] address is like having a mobile phone without a phone number,” Hinden said. “Mobile phones all want to be on the Internet, and they all need addresses.”

Microsoft Windows to Play Vital Role

The most critical role falls to Microsoft, whose Windows software is used on 90% of the world’s PCs.

“Nothing will change significantly until Microsoft puts [IPv6] into Windows,” said Scott Bradner, 56, vice president for standards of the Internet Society. “We’re just waiting for Microsoft to say when they’ll start shipping it in Windows.”

The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant hasn’t announced any dates yet, though earlier this year Microsoft arranged for some customers to test a piece of Windows that understands IPv6. “We’re still in the development stages,” said Shanen Boettcher, lead product manager for Microsoft’s Windows 2000. A full-fledged IPv6 version for Windows is still probably a few years away.

Given that roughly half the computers on the Internet are new to the network in any given year, the protocol should spread across the Internet quickly once software with IPv6 is introduced.

Once IPv6 does become widespread, all sorts of devices will be able to connect to the Net on an equal footing with computers. And that’s when things really start to get interesting to the Internet visionaries like Allison Mankin, 44, computer network specialist for USC’s Information Sciences Institute.

She imagines the day when electronic books will use the Internet to communicate with libraries and publishers, so they can alert readers when new chapters are available. The e-books also could coordinate with an Internet-enabled television set-top box to find related programs on TV. Even misplaced office chairs could be tracked down through the Internet.

Ultimately, each home could easily need scores of Internet addresses to accommodate such devices, Mankin said. With IPv6, there will be enough addresses to allow each person to have 64,000 networks in his or her house, Hinden said.

Ultimately, the Internet mechanics will know they did their job well if regular Net users don’t notice that anything has changed.

Imagining the future technologies that will be made possible by IPv6 is almost impossible, though, even for the pioneers who built the Net and are still working diligently to preserve it.

“Nobody would have predicted the Web,” Bradner said. “You don’t know what will come around the pike. We don’t know what we would be missing.”