* traditional Internet addresses to be exhausted by 2011
* not good idea to buy equipment unready for new Internet Protocol
By Niclas Mika
CAIRO, May 14 (Reuters) - Computer network managers must prepare for a scarcity of traditional Internet addresses, especially in regions such as Africa, the numbers registry for Africa said.
Adiel Akplogan, Chief Executive of AfriNIC, said he was well aware previous warnings that the world was running out of Internet addresses had proved premature and workarounds had been developed, but a number of reputable groups had concluded things were different this time.
"The most optimistic study says that by 2011 we will have exhausted IPv4 addresses," he told Reuters in an interview at the ITU Telecom Africa conference, referring to the widely used version of the Internet Protocol (IP).
Akplogan -- whose organisation is based in Cyber City on the island of Mauritius -- said IT managers needed to think ahead especially in regions such as Africa where throwing money at a problem at the last minute was often not an option.
A new IP version, dubbed IPv6, has long been drawn up, and both can coexist in the transition, he said. Once Internet registries run out of IPv4 addresses, they will move on to assigning IPv6 addresses.
"We still see people buying equipment that is not IPv6 ready. That's not a good idea," he said.
IP addresses are at the heart of transmitting data over the Internet -- a string of numbers such as 172.168.0.1, they uniquely identify a computer, much in the way a name and a postal address identifies the recipient of a piece of mail.
A Web address such as "www.reuters.com" is -- invisibly for the user -- translated into an IP address to contact the Web server and load the page.
The current format of IP addresses means that globally, around 4 billion addresses are available.
The new version expands that number dramatically -- a Microsoft document notes that every square metre of the earth could be assigned almost a septillion addresses, 655,570,793,348,866,943,898,599 to be exact. (Reporting by Niclas Mika; Editing by David Holmes)
