IP Address

961 Words2 Pages

As stated by the website howstuffworks.com (What is an IP address?), ‘An IP address is assigned to every device connected to the Internet. This is a 32 bit protocol, as it consists of 4 binary octets’. However they are usually written in decimal form for ease of use. The maximum decimal number allowed by one octet is 255 (or 11111111 in binary). The total number of unique possibilities of 4 octets would therefore be 256^4, roughly 4.3 billion addresses.

Demand for IP addresses is increasing due to reasons such as low cost computers, advancement in technology, and improvements in accessibility. Personal computers have been subject to a dramatic decrease in price over the last 10 years, allowing them to be bought by more households – 70% had at least one in 2007, compared with 49% in 2001/2 (statistics.gov.uk). This was just in the UK, however the same thing has happened globally.

Advancement in technology has enabled mobile telephones to connect to the Internet, thus dramatically increasing the number of devices connecting to it. Internet access via mobile phones has risen as 3G networks allow a decent download speed of up to 14Mbps, compared to 2G with 114Kbps.

Accessibility to computers has also been advanced, with the general public being proficient with them, as opposed to a specialist. This is due to the development of GUI’s (Graphical User Interfaces). GUI’s mean one doesn’t have to type in commands to the computer using a terminal, rather one can click a button instead, which is practical as it saves having to learn a new language. Disabled people can also use computers, as specialist software ships with the recent operating systems, such as a narrator, screen magnifier and speech recognition software.

An increase in w...

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...Translation Works [Online] Available at http://computer.howstuffworks.com/nat.htm [Accessed 1 November 2009]

NAT Diagram from Dan’s Electronics and Computer Blog. Routers, Firewalls, and Network Address Translation (NAT)… uh, I’m confused [Online] Available at http://www.zippyreviews.com/consumer_electronics_computers_blog/computer-peripherals-and-accessories/routers-firewalls-and-network-address-translation-nat [Accessed 3 November 2009]

The Telegraph, 2008. Internet will run out of IP addresses by 2010, warns Vint Cerf [Online] Available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/3076933/Internet-will-run-out-of-IP-addresses-by-2010-warns-Vint-Cerf.html [Accessed 5 November 2009]

COMPUTERWORLD, 2006. What you need to know about IPv6 [Online] Available at http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9001770/What_you_need_to_know_about_IPv6 [Accessed 5 November 2009]

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