Britain will run out of Internet addresses by 2012

According to Vint Cerf, Google's vice-president credited with inventing the modern Internet,the "unbelievable" trend could prevent British businesses from communicating with their customers around the world and in the UK, and hold back the development of a new wave of connected devices.

He told delegates at an Internet conference in London that it was "particularly embarrassing for the UK, which had played such a key role in the development of the Internet" and said that Britain was a long way behind many other European countries including the Czech Republic.

Cerf said the final tranche of web addresses will be allocated between the organisations that provide them to individual customers in spring next year, and that they would all be used up "sometime in 2012", 'The Daily Telegraph' said.

He warned that without the implementation of a new system, "we will run out -- there will be address trade and attempts at hijacking."

The bulk of the Internet is currently based on a protocol called IPv4. A new version, called IPv6, is already established, but the majority of Internet service providers have yet to turn it on. The two systems cannot talk to each other, so British users of IPv4 will need either new equipment or a software upgrade.

Cerf said: "If you don't do something about this the UK will not be able to reach the rest of the world that’s on v6. It's a business issue that’s of relevance to every company that uses the Internet to do business. The ISP will be reduced to selling telephone without a telephone number."