The Ip Address Shortage; Dhcp - Freecom SILVER STORE 2-DRIVE NAS User Manual

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The IP address shortage

The Internet has grown larger than anyone ever imagined it could be. Although the exact
size is unknown, the current estimate is that there are about 100 million hosts and more
than 350 million users actively on the Internet. In fact, the rate of growth has been such
that the Internet is effectively doubling in size each year.
When IP addressing first came out, everyone thought that there were plenty of addresses
to cover any need. Theoretically, you could have 4,294,967,296 unique addresses. The actual
number of available addresses is smaller (somewhere between 3.2 and 3.3 billion) because
of the way that the addresses are separated into classes, and because some addresses are
set aside for multicasting, testing or other special uses.
With the explosion of the Internet and the increase in home networks and business networks,
the number of available IP addresses is simply not enough. The obvious solution is to
redesign the address format to allow for more possible addresses. This is being developed
(called IPv6), but will take many years to implement because it requires modification of the
entire infrastructure of the Internet.
There are 2 systems in place now to help bring down the shortage of IP addresses.

DHCP

First, most users today have a dynamically given IP address or DHCP address from their
provider. This means that the IP address given to you can change over time. This allows the
provider to use the IP address for more then one person or device, since people are often
online at different times. Optimal usage of IP addresses is guaranteed.
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