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It’s kind of like Y2K, except the problem is a lot more real than the millennium bug, and the solution is far more difficult to deploy, but other than that, yeah… it’s a pretty tasty one to chew on.

The Internet will run out of available IP addresses within the next 12 months according to top experts who apparently get paid to count IP addresses, which is a totally boring and yet rather unique job.

For those who aren’t familiar with IP addressing, its the method by which computers connect to each other on the Internet. The current method, which is four sets of three numbers separated by a period is capable of approximately 4 billion unique numbers.

Unfortunately, with all of the new mobile devices connecting out there… we’ve pretty darned near exhausted our supply. 

There are potential solutions, like the rapid implementation of IPv6, which is capable of a far greater number of available numbers, but that includes challenges and drawbacks not likely to be hammered out in the next year or so.

In fact, IPv6 has been being developed for more than ten years now just to tackle this very problem, and as you can see, no one wants to touch it yet. It’s just not reliable technology, certainly not reliable enough to run a backbone system that most of us depend upon daily.

In many ways this problem is very similar to what the phone companies went through a number of years ago. They chewed up so many phone numbers so fast as the technology became adopted that they had to add more numbers to the calling sequence in a hurry, or risk running out of phone numbers. That was the birth of the area code, and as we hear it now, they may need to repeat the process and assign even more number soon.

It’s sort of amazing when you think about the technological explosion we’re seeing here too. 10 years ago, computers were just beginning to become household items. Today, in a world with 6.5 billion people, the vast majority of which do not own computers or mobile devices, 4 billion plausible numbers just isn’t enough.

Wow, sort of mind boggling. Or maybe my mind is just very small.

In any event, no one panic. We’re going to shut down the Internet for a few years until we come up with a better plan. Either than, or you all need to stop using up mobile IP addresses right now. You, not me, I love my iPhone and iPad. Okay, I guess if you’re unwilling to do that, we should just let the Internet Brain Trust figure this whole thing out.

Let’s just hope they aren’t too busy playing Halo and tweeting all day to actually work on the problem. They only have about 12 months to figure it all out, and let the rest of us know what the plan is in time to implement it.

No pressure or anything.