New IP Gets Push

Internet Protocol version 6 will let trillions of devices cozy up to the Net.

James Niccolai, IDG News Service

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More than 20 telecommunications providers and information technology vendors will announce the formation of the IPv6 Forum, dedicated to raising awareness and speeding introduction of the new protocol, says the IETF source, who asked not to be identified.

IPv6 has been on the radar screen for some time, but a global push to raise awareness of the new protocol would signify a new level of urgency for updating the Internet's most fundamental technology.

More IP Addresses, Please

IPv6 is intended to solve a number of problems inherent in the current Internet protocol, called IPv4. Chief among them is the need to create more IP addresses to meet the growing numbers of consumers and businesses jumping on the Internet, says Stan Schatt, a research director with Giga Information Group.

An IP address is a unique identifier assigned to each client connected to the Internet. It allows different clients to locate and communicate with each other. IPv4 uses a 32-bit address system, which in theory allows more than 4 billion unique IP addresses. Inefficiencies in the system of allocating those addresses means the actual number available is smaller. IPv6, in contrast, uses 128-bit addresses which in theory will cater to trillions and trillions of Internet clients.

IPv6 has other benefits, including the ability to offer greater security for data traveling over the Internet, as well as better performance and improved support for quality-of-service applications and real-time communications, says Schatt.

Fred Baker, chairman of the IETF, wouldn't confirm that an IPv6 Forum is in the works, but says such an effort would make sense. Though the protocol has been around for years, service providers have been slow to adopt it.

The Catch-22

Until customers become aware of the benefits of IPv6, they won't call on vendors and ISPs to support the new protocol in their products, Baker says. At the same time, the industry won't embark on the task of implementing the new protocol until customers start asking for it, he says.

"It's a major undertaking, and it doesn't do you any good unless both parties in an exchange are using it," observes Schatt.

The plan is to introduce IPv6 gradually over the next four to five years, while maintaining backward compatibility in the network for software and networking equipment that still use the IPv4 standard, Baker says.

No one knows exactly when the existing supply of IP addresses will run out, although Baker, Schatt and others say there is no cause for alarm. Many businesses have found a workaround to the IP address shortage by assigning their own, nonunique IP addresses within their own networks, Baker and others say. The companies then use a program called a network address translator to change those proprietary IP addresses into ones recognizable on the public Internet.

But the network address translator acts as an additional obstacle to data as it travels over a network, and impedes certain types of applications from working at all, Baker says.

IPv4: Antiquated Technology

IPv4 was developed 20 years ago, at a time when the Internet was a much smaller medium that primarily served academic and government needs, rather than those of business and consumers.

A single standard hasn't been settled on for the new protocol, but work has come far enough along that some vendors have already committed to development and testing projects. All of the major router vendors have made plans to support IPv6 in their products.

In addition, vendors including Apple Computer, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, and Sun Microsystems have begun preparations to support IPv6 on desktop machines and servers, the working group says.

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