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The Internet gets bigger
26-07-2004
by Deirdre McArdle

To create more space for the ever-growing number of Web pages, Internet Protocol version 6 has been agreed to by the Internet's addressing authority.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced at its bi-annual five-day meeting in Kuala Lumpar that Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) has been added to the Internet's Domain Name Servers (DNS) root server system. ICANN will now be able to allocate IP addresses and domain names using this latest version of the Internet. The current version is IPv4.

IPv6 is a change to the basic Internet infrastructure that will allow millions more devices to attach to it. The popularity of the wireless Internet and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has put increasing pressure on the IPv4-based Internet in recent months and the introduction of IPv6 is essential to enable the Net and related technologies to grow.

IPv6 will allow for 340 sextillion (36 zeros) Internet addresses as opposed to IPv4, which only allows for 4 billion addresses. The newer protocol also boasts a 128-bit addressing system as compared to IPv4's 32-bit system.

Both Asia and Europe are the first regions likely to suffer a shortage of IP addresses some expert say. Both regions have been quick to adopt new technologies like the wireless Internet and had been allocated a lesser number of IP addresses with IPv4 as compared to the US and US-based organisations, which have been allocated almost two thirds of the world's IPv4 addresses.

At the outset IPv6 will be seen on Japan's (dot-jp), Korea's (dot-kr) and France's (dot-fr) country codes. Both IPv6 and IPv4 will initially be available together and users of IPv6 will be able to communicate with users of IPv4. "This is really the first step forward in making IPv6 a useful protocol. A full conversion to IPv6 is still several years away. We won't likely even start to see widespread adoption until 2008 or 2010," said Michael Howard, an analyst with Infonetics Research.

The IEDR, the company that is responsible for dot-ie (.ie) domain names, has said that it started working on implementing IPv6 in March 2004. The company has been working with its partners Eircom and Cisco to make the necessary change and reports that progress has been good. "The IEDR will soon introduce a new name server (ns6.iedr.ie inet addr:213.190.149.221 inet6 addr: 2001:bb0:ccc3::2 ) that is capable of answering DNS queries for the domains within the IE zone using the IPv6 protocol," said Billy Glynn from IEDR's Technical Services team.