Believe it or not, the internet was not originally an infinitely spanning space. At the time when the IPv4 protocol was created the founders of the internet never believed they'd have to worry about running out of IP addresses. That's because they couldn't imagine that there would be more than 4.3 billion devices connected to the internet at one time.

However, that threshold is quickly coming to pass and the internet is running out of unique IP addresses. This is where the transition to IPv6 is going to come into play. The limit for IPv6 is a staggering 340 undecillion. That's equates to 340 trillion trillion trillion, or in numerical form: 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Whereas it may have taken well over 30 years for us to fill up 4 billion IP addresses and those that created the IPv4 protocol couldn't imagine us filling up that many addresses, we are in a similar situation with IPv6. We can't imagine how long it will take to fill all those unique IP addresses if ever. This will leave use with virtually infinite space.

June 6, 2012 was the global launch of IPv6 and the beginning of major sites and ISPs to transition over. You can find more information here.