June 6th: A New Era of Internet Begins


Bangalore: The internet is on the brink of a major upgrade. The giants on the internet have already patched up for the big jump to the next generation IPv6 which is going to be launched on June 6th, this Wednesday at 0001 GMT. "IPv6 is being enabled and kept on by more than 1,500 Web sites and ISPs in 22 countries," said Arbor Networks, a company that monitors global Internet traffic closely.

A 24 hour test was conducted last year but now it’s time to face the reality. The much awaited IPv6 launch was very much needed because the number of IP address in the old IPv4 has already exhausted.  But it will take several years to complete the full transition and for the old devices that are still running on IPv4 platform should continue to function as before.

The introduction of IPv6 was very much needed because with a population around 7 billion who uses the internet, IPv4 hasn’t got as many resources for all of them. This problem, which is also called IPv4 address exhaustion, made developers to think and start on a better and larger platform called IPv6. Early 90’s saw the development of this platform and later continuous tests were run from early 2000’s. As IPv4 offers only a mere 4.3 billion addresses, the big brother IPv6 offers an unfathomable 340 decillion addresses.

But as the internet shift gears, users and networks are slightly skeptical about the stability issues. “Most users shouldn't notice anything," said Leo Vegoda, a "numbers resources" manager for the internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which manages the Internet address system. But still Vegoda said that the users may find slight instability as their networks and devices are being moved to new standards. According to reports from Cisco, by 2016 around 18.9 billion will be the number of connections across the globe. It’s like 2.5 connections per person.