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Similar to the telephone system which uses numbers to route calls, the designers of the Internet developed a numbering scheme for routing data packets. This numbering scheme is called Internet Protocol or IP Addressing . Every device connected to the Internet gets an address based on the binary system. All IP addresses consist of four bytes seperated by periods, or "dots". 10010101. 11011001. 11011001. 11011101 These numbers are usually referred to by their decimal equivalents. Each byte has a value between 0 (00000000) and 255 (11111111). Every PC, router, and server connected to the Internet has a unique IP address. IP addresses are allocated in blocks. Usually companies are given a class C block of IP addresses that represents 255 unique addresses. The company then assigns the last number of the IP addresses as needed for their networks. 123.45.111.XXX By allocating these blocks of numbers to the networks, it will prevent duplicate IP addresses from occurring.    123.45.111.78      123.45.111.17      123.45.111.14        123.45.111.170      123.45.111.223 Larger organizations are given multiple Class C blocks, or in rare cases, a Class B block. With a Class B the organization assigns the last two numbers resulting in a possible 65,000 unique numbers. 123.45.XXX.XXX You may have heard that we may run out of IP address soon. Experts say this could occur around the year 2005. Hopefully a solution to the problem will be found by that time.

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