The internet's size capacity, does it have an upper limit?

As someone who grew up to adulthood without knowledge that the internet existed, it still seems like both a magic toy and the stuff of a civilization changing societal epoch. From seeing it grow from websites to emails, then to youtube, then to streaming movies and telephone replacement and the clouds and all the rest, does the thing have some kind of capacity?

I know about packets of information, and the general data about how my typed letters on this screen will soon be "put up" on an internet thread. But someday will someone be typing and find out that the internet is too full to take one more byte? Do more and more servers actually keep the internet going, and with size limitations - both macro and micro - what is the current limit and the theoretical limit of "stuff" that can be "stuffed" onto the net? Thanks.

reply to post by Aleister


No. The internet "size" limit simply doesn't exist. Storage capacity isn't the internet. Lets use ATS as an example.
The only limitation comes in the form of the particular site you are using, and their storage ability. There is no" internet storage" individual sites do that on their own, the internet merely lets them communicate


The stuff you post here isn't "stored on the internet" because the internet is merely the network that allows computers to talk. The stuff you post on ATS gets stored on a dataserver, probably in a datacenter hosted by a hosting company, who can simply slam more drives into the server when needed.

The only limitation to the internet is IP addresses. Right now, most places are still using IP version 4. We're just about out of IP4 addresses. In fact, if every internet user was on at the same time, a good chunk of us wouldn't be on at all cause there aren't enough addresses to go around.

IPv6 solves this, but has yet to be implemented on a large scale.

Think of it this way. Telephone numbers. 555-6789 that's an address someone can use on the phone network to contact you. There are only so many combinations of numbers available, once you are out, you are out. That's why you have Area Codes, so 555-6789 can be used various times, with a new area code appended to the beginning.

IPv4 is your phone number. We're about out of numbers, yet more and more devices are coming online. Without adding an area code, we can't support them all. IPv4 doesn't have a method to extend it, once it's used up, that's it.

You can google and find articles about BT (british telecom?) trying to use carrier grade NAT (network address translation) to allow users to share the same IP, which basically breaks the internet.

reply to post by Aleister


I take it you don't know much about the concept of 'the internet'.
If you do, and you mean something entirely different, than excuse me for my following reply:

'The internet' is an internet of internets.
The data I'm writing now will be written on a (virtual) server.
It is possible that the engineer(s) responsible for that server are not monitoring disk space.
Though I find that highly unlikely.
And even if that happens, you would still be able to write to all the other servers connected to 'the internet".

So as long as there is enough storage and that storage is managed well, you shouldn't have to worry.

ETA: poster above eplains it better than I did.

Did that answer your question?

reply to post by phishyblankwaters

Thanks very much for your informative post. So the shortage of IP addresses, you seem to say, is the major problem with internet load. This is the first I've heard of the IP address shortage (that's how net savvy I am). With IP-6, will this be solved "for all eternity" or will IP-7, 8, and 9 be coming soon? And if everyone needs to have IP-6 applied to their personal computers, will this be done server by server or will some internet control switch be able to implement IP-6 all at once? Guess I'm in the questioning "Why is the sky blue, daddy?" mood, but you've already expanded my knowledge. Thanks again.

reply to post by z00mster

Thanks. No, I'm not very tech-knowledgable (isn't it a series of tubes?), but was not worried about it as much as a "how much can it hold" question. So if the net isn't really a "thing" but a communication system between servers and drives and individual computers, how can there be an internet-kill-switch that some governments put in place?

reply to post by Aleister


There is no shortage of IP addresses since the move to IPv6

The agency moved the Internet’s capabilities from 4.3 billion unique addresses to 340 undecillion. For the non-Saganites in the house, that's about 340 trillion trillion trillion, or a growth factor of 79 octillion (79 billion billion billion). In other words, massively ginormous.

The new standard, called IPv6, offers up “enough IP combinations for everyone in the world to have a billion billion IP addresses for every second of their life,” CNN notes. (Good news, by the way, because Cisco estimates that there will be three networked devices per human on the planet by 2016, as CNN also reported.)

I think will last us for quite some time

reply to post by PhoenixOD

Wow. I'm glad I put up this thread, if just to learn about IPv6. Thanks to everyone! That's quite a jump in capacity. So do we all have IP6 now or, as said earlier in the thread, is the problem with implementing it?

reply to post by Aleister


There is no upper limit.

The web in it's simplest form a very large interconnected system of computers.

Most of those computers live in datacenters.






It's a very neat thing to go into those datacenters to see all the different racks with computers in them.

reply to post by Aleister


Not only do we have more addresses but the way IPv6 is structured makes the entire system much , much more efficient. The IPv6 is sort of self compressing so even though the address is 128 bits compared to the original 32 bit IPv4 it can be condensed down to something much shorter. This is dont by removing leading 0's and one set of grouped 0's.

The 128 bits of an IPv6 address are represented in 8 groups of 16 bits each. Each group is written as 4 hexadecimal digits and the groups are separated by colons ( : ). The address 2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:ff00:0042:8329 is an example of this representation.

For convenience, an IPv6 address may be abbreviated to shorter notations by application of the following rules, where possible.

One or more leading zeroes from any groups of hexadecimal digits are removed; this is usually done to either all or none of the leading zeroes. For example, the group 0042 is converted to 42.
Consecutive sections of zeroes are replaced with a double colon ( :: ). The double colon may only be used once in an address, as multiple use would render the address indeterminate. RFC 5952 recommends that a double colon should not be used to denote an omitted single section of zeroes.[37]

An example of application of these rules:

Initial address: 2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:ff00:0042:8329
After removing all leading zeroes: 2001:db8:0:0:0:ff00:42:8329
After omitting consecutive sections of zeroes: 2001:db8::ff00:42:8329

The loopback address, 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0001, may be abbreviated to ::1 by using both rules.

reply to post by PhoenixOD


With IPv6 there will never be a shortage. Sadly, it's not fully implemented and will cause internet fragmentation until all ISPs fully implement it.

If you have a computer, and it's less than 10 years old or so, your TCPIP stack already supports IPv6 addressing.

The internet, as a whole, does not.

reply to post by Aleister

So do we all have IP6 now or, as said earlier in the thread, is the problem with implementing it?

You already have it, it's merely a waiting game until enough of the ISPs switch over to it. Some are refusing, like BT and instead going with carriergrade NAT which will break a heck of a lot of services for those poor users stuck with it.

reply to post by Aleister

So if the net isn't really a "thing" but a communication system between servers and drives and individual computers, how can there be an internet-kill-switch that some governments put in place?

Simple. All of this works on the telecommunications network, which is built, controlled, and owned by a handful of ISPs. Something as simple as switching off DNS means if you don't know the exact IP address of www.google.com you can't get to it, because DNS is what converts www.google.com to 192.168.0.1 (not it's real IP of course).

Another method would be, at the ISP level, to simply stop routing traffic.

for example. After 911 we learned that the US government had built a traffic trap into the AT&T network. Every packet of data moving through their network was routed through this trap for them to look at. If mandated to by law, the ISP could be forced to stop routing traffic from their network to others.

The internet is a bunch of smaller networks plugged into each other. It's built to be redundant, routers move traffic through the most efficient channels, but if a node fails, it can be routed around it. You can simply turn that feature off, the internet immediately becomes a few isolated networks, and if you are in the wrong segment, you can't connect to someone who isn't in your segment.

A kill switch isn't really the right term, they aren't going to turn anything physically off, they'd just stop routing the traffic.

reply to post by grey580

It's a very neat thing to go into those datacenters to see all the different racks with computers in them.

But see, that's the thing, those data centers hosting the data aren't the internet. A datacenter of racks of switches would be more appropriate. I love being called over to the data center, they just built a new one for the government and have been migrating services over to it. The old one was nice, full of blinking lights and whizzing fans... The new one is something out of Star Trek. Very geek sexy.

======

In October 2011, 263 (85%) of the 294 top-level domains (TLDs) in the Internet supported IPv6 to access their domain name servers, and 234 (76%) zones contained IPv6 glue records, and approximately 3.4 million domains (3%) had IPv6 address records in their zones. Of all networks in the global BGP routing table, 12% have IPv6 protocol support.[3]

By 2011 all major operating systems in use on personal computers and server systems had production-quality IPv6 implementations.[4] Microsoft Windows has supported IPv6 since Windows 2000, and in production-ready state beginning with Windows XP. Windows Vista and later have improved IPv6 support.[5] Mac OS X Panther (10.3), Linux 2.6, FreeBSD, and Solaris also have mature production implementations. Some implementations of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file transfer protocol make use of IPv6 to avoid NAT issues common for IPv4 private networks.[6]

Source

Granted, it's two years old now... but here's the key line :Of all networks in the global BGP routing table, 12% have IPv6 protocol support.

12% have IPv6 support, we're really dragging our heels here and if we don't force the ISPs to adopt the technology already in place to fix it, we will all suffer.

I have more than 3 internet connected devices. So does my wife. So do most of the people I know. And now EVERYTHING wants to be online, your TV, your fridge, all of it. As this expands with the spectrums they took away from Antenna TV to give first mile internet access, you will see more and more "smart devices" coming online. We need IPv6, and honestly, I don't understand the hold up.

If your ISP supports IPv6 and gives you an IPv6 address, and you are trying to connect to a system on an IPv4 only setup, it aint gonna work.

No no no no no. I won't even have a bar of it. All that great advice too, perfectly explained.

But - No such thing as a 'kill switch' or any government capable of taking down the internet as-it-is.

The question as it was even asked here just now, ignores the facts that explain there is no such thing, assumes that there is such a thing, and then asks how can it be, if things are as you describe.

A firm NO. simply because anything else starts off without NO and leads to someone else ending up confused but not hearing a firm NO.

Oo

There used to a sort of kill switch whereby with the setting of a bit it would force the router to prioritize that packet above others so if there was enough packets sent with the bit set then everything else would grind to an halt but its been repurposed for something else now

No. That which can be endlessly and eternally expanded, duplicated, replicated .etc...never reaches a "limit". It just keeps expanding with more and more servers, pathways, links, extensions, clouds whatever you want to call it.

I as well as the other poster-responder here...believes you don't grasp the concept of "inter-net". Its not one thing....its millions of things making it in what appears to you...to be just "one thing".

Reaching some imagined limit...it just branches out further...and those branch even further and further...endlessly.

The future of the internet and data storage is an Illusion, but it's there In Holographic form!
Storing data not just one way, but layers inside layers inside layers, using light refraction.

Holographic Data storage

This technology could be wild.

But Most likely quantum computing will beat this technology and we will be surfing as many sites we want at the same time, while playing as many different games, talking to our friends via instant video and voice and other sense chat, while scanning our bodies for various things all at once. Just think, Instant, Multiple, Digital Actions.

Quantum Computing

The internet is only limited to our innovation. The future is created by the imagination of people today.

reply to post by phishyblankwaters


Kinda makes you wonder if social security numbers have ever been reused and then mixed up.

Originally posted by Tranceopticalinclined
The future of the internet and data storage is an Illusion, but it's there

In Holographic form!
Storing data not just one way, but layers inside layers inside layers, using light refraction.

Holographic Data storage

This technology could be wild.

But Most likely quantum computing will beat this technology and we will be surfing as many sites we want at the same time, while playing as many different games, talking to our friends via instant video and voice and other sense chat, while scanning our bodies for various things all at once. Just think, Instant, Multiple, Digital Actions.

Quantum Computing



The internet is only limited to our innovation. The future is created by the imagination of people today.

edit on E-5-8034 by Aliens because: (The Internet is ours!)

edit on 7-5-2013 by Tranceopticalinclined because: To reclaim the internet!

Well that's about the most well written thing about a very interesting concept I've seen on this site. Bravo, and hats off to you in the old style of saying "Well done". I've never read either of those wikipedia articles, and plan to study them (after doing a run-thru on the Holographic Data Storage page) until I can wrap my head around them (i.e. create a retrieveable image or a map of the data). The holographic data storage page looks particularly interesting. If there is not a thread on it, please consider starting one. Thanks. extra DIV