After ten years of struggling to launch, the forces behind IPv6 are combining their special powers this June to officially launch the next-generation of Internet transport technology.
Ironically apart from the catch-22 of support vs. adoption that limits all major infrastructure rollouts, it has been the continual clever patching-up of IPv4 such as Network Address Translation (NAT) which have made features such as the expanded address space of IPv6 so hard to sell. But when the very last block of IPv4 addresses was distributed last year even the sceptics agreed the writing was now truly on IANA’s wall – all 4 billion words of it.
So now we can look forward to everything having an IP address. Every toaster, fridge and mobile phone. Every building, car and lawnmower. Every teddy bear, soup bowl or contact lens. Everyone on earth could have an IP address for every cell in their body and it wouldn’t even dent the allocation. There is so much space in the new system that even a typical office subnet will now be the size of the entire current Internet squared.
The Internet Of Things will finally be truly possible! The only problem is, where are we going to find all these 3.4×1038 things? I guess we’ll just have to keep asking Google.
http://www.worldipv6launch.org/
