If businesses, governments, and education institutions don’t upgrade to a newer IP address standard relatively soon, we could experience an unnerving scenario: the world running out of Internet addresses.

The report, released by the European Commission, states that only 17% of 610 institutions surveyed have upgraded from the IPv4 protocol to IPv6. Without this upgrade, the Internet can only support between 4 and 4.5 billion IP addresses, the unique string of numbers associated with every website in existence. According to The Telegraph, the web will be close to the critical point by the end of 2010.



For those who may not be familiar with the structure of the web: every website is assigned a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address, usually a string of numbers such as 98.129.174.16. The “www.mashable.com” you usually see is meant to make it easier to find your favorite websites. Currently, we use two version of the IP – IPv4 (the original version) and IPv6 (developed in the mid-1990s). IPv6, with its 128-bit web addresses, can support far more IP addresses tha