by Charles Miller

Last week I teased how thirty years ago when the internet exploded in popularity it was on an inevitable collision course with disaster when all the IP addresses would be used up. Then my local cable television provider, serving only a few thousand customers in my East Texas hometown, was a part of solving this problem and averting the disaster that could have crippled the entire internet.

"The Internet," such as it was in the 1980s, was accessed by dial-up telephone modems. In the 1990s when the local Cypress Valley Cable TV (CVCTV) offered always-connected broadband internet, I jumped at the chance to be one of the first subscribers. No longer did I need to budget over $100 dollars a month for telephone long-distance charges to get online by telephone-connected modem for just a few hours. For only $20 per month I could have one computer connected 24/7/365.

When I bought my first "portable" computer, a 25-pound luggable the size of a suitcase, I wanted to connect it online also. To do that, the cable company required another $20 monthly service charge. Then when I expanded to a third computer, that added yet another $20 per month. Believe it or not, I was glad to pay it because $60 per month was still a lot less that what I had previously been paying the telephone company in long distance charges.

If you go back and read last week’s column you might understand that the original concept of the internet was for every computer on the net to have a unique IP address just as every computer already had a unique MAC address. The cable company CVTCV was charging me $20 per month for each of the three MAC addresses I used. It was not possible to just switch the cable from one computer to another because the internet service was tied to the MAC address of a specific computer.

By the 1990s I was on track to pay darn near $2,000 dollars per year for internet service. Then I started hearing about a mysterious black box that could legally slash my internet bill back to $20 per month, so naturally I ordered one. The black box was a tiny computer — no monitor or keyboard — and it was the only thing you connected to your internet modem. All your computers then connected to that black box. The black box would handle sending and receiving internet traffic for all the computers connected to it and "route" traffic to the correct one. Did you ever wonder why we call those things "routers?"

This process is made possible by NAT (Net Address Translation). With NAT you need only one IP address for your whole house. So I called up CVCTV to cancel all my $20 monthly charges except for my "new" computer. My monthly bill dropped from $100+ down to $20. CVCTV was probably not happy when I told them I was cutting back to one computer. Technically I was not being dishonest because the one router I connected to their internet service was in fact a small computer.

For me the most welcome side effect of NAT was that rather than paying $20 per month for each computer I connected to the internet, I paid only one $20 internet service for all of them. For the worldwide internet as a whole, the benefit was that using NAT meant that the demand for IP addresses fell drastically. There were only 4 billion IP addresses available and it was impossible to create more. Engineers feared when those ran out the internet would come to a crashing halt, before the end of the 1990s. NAT is the reason that catastrophe did not happen as and when feared. It did happen, but that is another story.

My local cable television/internet provider serving only a few thousand customers in my East Texas hometown was a part of averting the worst of the disaster that could have crippled the internet. It was because Cypress Valley Cable TV insisted on charging $20 per computer that I bought my first NATing router. First the computer hobbyist bought new routers to save money on internet connection fees. Then by the 2000s all the Internet Service Providers were providing NATing routers to all their customers so as to not run out of the limited number of IP addresses they had available to sell. That postponed the inevitable for decades, but on January 31, 2011, the global pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses started to be exhausted. What this means and why running out of IP addresses 15 years ago did not cripple the internet is a story for next week.

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Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

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