How worried should we be about the growing number of potholes on the Information Superhighway?
It’s amazing how well the Internet performs considering that so many different organisations supply the infrastructure and that so many different demands are made on the network and that so many individuals and companies all around the globe are using its services.
But, on a typical day, outages normally affect 6,000 routes and, earlier this week, the number doubled to 12,600. The number of routes mapped by the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) has just passed 512,000 which presents its own technical problems.
Then there is the issue of Internet addresses. The standard version 4 of the Internet Protocol (IPv4) ‘only’ provides 4.3 billion potential addresses but we are now running out of addresses and some infrastructure companies have been slow to roll out IPv6 which provides access to vastly more addresses.
You can read an article on the current problems, carried by today’s “Guardian”, here.
Now, as long as ten years ago, I first wrote a column about the technical challenges faced by the Internet. Seven years ago, I devoted a column to the capacity problems faced by the Net. Five years ago, I produced a column explaining the need for IPv6. A year ago, in a column, I detailed a series of breakdowns on the Net.
So we have seen these problems coming for a long time …