The woman who cut me off on the freeway because she was too busy talking on her cell phone might not have had a clue, but she probably had an IP address. Mobile devices, from cell phones to PDAs to the automobiles themselves, increasingly require always-on Internet connectivity. According to at least one report, the average U.S. home has over 250 devices that could benefit from Internet connectivity. While the number of IP addresses in the world is large -- IPv4's 32-bit addressing scheme enables 4 billion addresses -- it is not infinite. And the woman applying blue eyeshadow on the 101 freeway is using up one of them.

You may have heard this argument for IPv6 before: that the Internet needs to expand to IPv6 (128-bit addresses, enabling enough addresses for every grain of sand on the planet). There are plenty of other advantages to the IPv6 protocol, however, which often get shunted down to the last paragraph or two in an article.

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