Ipv6 Addresses

The massive growth of the Internet has demonstrated its value to businesses, government, professionals, academics and individuals over the last decade. Industry now relies on on a range of benefits from Internet technology and has seen significant productivity gains.

The benefits of the Internet are drawn directly from the platform of interoperability created by use of the Internet Protocol, leading to a large "network effect". That is, the benefits to a company from the Internet arise not just by the extent to which the company itself uses the Internet, but far more from the extent to which others - suppliers, customers and individuals - also use the Internet. Because IPv6 will greatly increase the size and range of devices connected to the Internet, the benefit of the network effect will increase accordingly.

The World Wide Web and other Internet applications currently use version 4 of the Internet Protocol - IPv4. IP version 6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force to deal with a looming shortage of addresses under IPv4. Since then, there have been numerous technical fixes to shore up IPv4 and postpone the need for a move to IPv6, as well as debate on whether IPv6 would even be required. That debate is now generally agreed to be over. The IPv4 address space is expected to run out around 2011 if there is no change to the existing rates of allocation. In practice, the only option for those building large new networks is to use IPv6.

Complexity has been introduced into the way that IP based-networks are already implemented because of address space shortage. Some IPv4 address space has been reserved for private IPv4 addresses, to help overcome these problems. These allocations have been used with network address translation to enable networks to connect to the Internet using only one globally routable IPv4 address. For example, in India, up to three levels of Network Address Translation have been observed.

IPv6 offers the...