Jordan O'BrienWaiting for that webpage to load? There could be a reason behind that, so says one of the Internet’s founders, Vint Cerf, as he warns that the ‘Internet of Things’ is slowing down the information highway.
Speaking at the National Press Club, Vint stressed how important it was that we get more Internet addresses, with Cisco Systems estimating that around 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020.
Many of these estimated 50 billion devices that will be connected to the Internet are set to be traditional items that previously hadn’t been served by an Internet connection, including the refrigerator and the car.
Each time a device requires an Internet connection, that device will need a unique Internet address, which Vint says there aren’t any left on the old system, IPv4.
Vint implores people to contact their ISPs to get switched to a newer standard, IPv6.
With IPv6 there are 340 undecillion number possibilities, which equates to around 340 trillion trillion trillion, far greater than the 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses.
So what’s this got to do with slow Internet? Well according to John Curran, the American Registry for Internet Numbers’ CEO, in the background the Internet is still be retooled to accommodate these new addresses, with many sites on the Internet still not being enabled for IPv6.
Even when the sites are enabled like Google, Facebook, Bing and YouTube, content on those sites may not be enabled, leading to slower streaming media or audio, as the media is broken up and forced to go the long way round.
The problem seems to stem from people using the new IPv6 addresses, but affects everyone on the web, despite there only being around 3 to 4% of Internet users using IPv6.