Internet 'backbone' gets upgrade

(London Daily Mail) The internet has just received its biggest overhaul since creator Tim Berners-Lee first typed 'www.' into a computer.

Before Wednesday, we were running out of website addresses - not the easy-to-remember ones like www.ebay.com, but instead the numeric ones known as IP addresses.

These are the strings of numbers which give each computer or internet-connected address a long, individual number from which they can send and receive transmissions.

IPv4, as the old system was known, provided 4.3billion addreseses, which sounds a lot.

And it definitely sounded a lot when the internet was still struggling through infancy in the 1980s.

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But with the rise of the world-wide-web, smartphones, tablets and the proliferation of computers across the world, the limit was reached - already at stretching point in 2008.

So now IPv6 - Internet Protocol version 6 - has come online, and brings with it 340 undecillion potential IP addresses.

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