US Technology to slip

The US technology lead is about to slip behind the rest of the world and it's its lead over the past decade that is at the root of the problem. With technolgy so widespread in the US, its infra-structure uses something called IP version 4. This was the technology that allowed computers to communicate with one another and is based on a computer addressing scheme that allows for up to 2.4 billion unique computer addresses. Current estimates are that the internet will run out of addresses by the year 2006.

A new scheme has been developed called IP version 6 which has essentially an unlimited number of addresses. Europe and Asia are in the process of adopting this scheme, but the US is balking at joining the rest of the world. The US doesn't want to change the addresses on all of its computers to use the new scheme. The future of interconnected home and office devices cannot be realized unless there are enough unique addresses for all these devices to be able to find each other on the world wide web.

The US will become the equivalent of a third world country unless it accepts this new standard and begins rolling out in the next two years.

5/19/01
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