Thirty years ago, when the original team of engineers started to design the
Internet technology, none of them could have imagined that this technology
eventually would be widely used not only in universities and laboratories but also
in enterprises and residences all over the world.
IPv6—Internet Protocol version 6—is the key word. Remarkably, without
knowing that the Internet would become so ubiquitous, these engineers designed
IPv4, the first widely deployed version of the TCP/IP network layer, in such a way
that it has been able to support the tremendous growth of the Internet to date.
However, public IPv4 address space is becoming increasingly scarce as heavily
populated countries such as India and China and market places such as the cellular
phone market converge to IP. The solution is IPv6.
IPv6 adoption represents the necessary step to prepare for the future Internet,
addressing the gap between increasing resource needs and available technology to
meet the demand. A useful analogy is the transition from old local analog
telephone systems and dialing plans to the international telephone numbering
system used today. More digits were added and communications infrastructures
were overhauled over time resulting in improved global access and new telephony
markets based on common standards. The basic protocols used for Internet
communications are going through a similar transformation that will have a much
more significant impact on the ways the world communicates.
IPv6 offers a larger address space that can handle the spectacular growth in
the adoption of the Internet and Internet-based technologies worldwide. If you are
not convinced that IPv6 represents the future of the Internet, consider that recent
versions of computer operating systems such as Apple Mac OS 10.5 Leopard,
Microsoft Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 have IPv6 set up as the
default. These operating systems are ready for the next generation, IPv6-enabled
Internet.