Mediaboss Marketing

The online industry is gearing up for what promises to be a watershed moment in the history of the internet on 6 June - a day known as World IPv6 Launch.

On that day, internet service providers (ISPs), home router manufacturers and web companies around the world will permanently enable version six of the IP addressing scheme (IPv6) for their products and services, in an attempt to kickstart a global transition to the new internet protocol.

Participating ISPs, such and AT&T, Comcast and the UK's education network Janet, will enable IPv6 for enough users so that at least one percent of their residential subscribers who visit participating websites will do so using IPv6.

Meanwhile, home networking equipment manufacturers, such as Cisco and D-Link, will enable IPv6 by default through their home router products, and web companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft Bing will permanently enable IPv6 on their main websites.

IPv6 is seen as critical to the internet's continued growth, as the current protocol, IPv4, allows for just 4.3 billion IP addresses - a number close to exhaustion due to the explosion of internet-connected devices. In comparison, IPv6 allows for 3.4 trillion trillion trillion addresses.

As well as accommodating internet growth for the foreseeable future, IPv6 could also enable the 'Internet of Things' - providing a large enough address pool for every electronic appliance to have an IP address and share data with other appliances in real time without human intervention.

"With IPv6, things are about to get very interesting indeed," said Ben Pirt, VP of engineering at Cosm. "Already we're starting to see devices as diverse as weighing scales, lighting and toasters connect to the Internet of Things. In the near future we're going to see much more sophisticated uses for these connected objects and sensors, helping us to better understand the world around us."

In February 2011, the internet authority IANA allocated its last batch of IPv4 addresses to the regional internet registries (RIRs), which are responsible for local distribution of IP addresses to enterprises and ISPs. When those stocks of IPv4 addresses run out, as has already happened in Asia, the RIRs will have no choice but to start distributing IPv6 addresses.

IPv4 and IPv6 can coexist, but they cannot intercommunicate, meaning that the two protocols will have to run in parallel - or dual stack - for some time, in order to avoid breakages in the network. However, this relies heavily on Network Address Translation (NAT), which limits the performance of the internet.

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Internet Industry Gears up for World IPv6 Launch