If you have not already become aware of IP Version 6, believe me you will. IP Version 6 will become a cause celebre in almost the same way that Year 2000 became a cause celebre – the major difference being that Year 2000 was an immovable deadline, whereas IPv6 is a creeping upgrade to the Internet, which will sooner or later create a stampede of implementation. So what is it?

For those of you who do not roll up your sleeves and probe the intricacies of network routing, IP stands for Internet Protocol and an IP address, which looks something like
194.169.11.242 – i.e. four numbers, each smaller than 256 separated by full stops, but in practice a 32 bit number. These four numbers were intended to uniquely identify every computer in the world when the protocol was created and also to act as an address, so that messages could be efficiently routed between computers. Unfortunately because of the way they were allocated and the dramatic growth of the Internet, 32 bits was not enough. Indeed pockets of IPv4 address exhaustion have just now started to appear.

So IPv4 is about to be replaced by IPv6, which is 128 bits and should last us at least until we start networking our computers with other planets in other solar systems in the universe. This address space is a large enough to assign a unique address to every proton in or on the planet earth.

You could say that IPv4 was the PC Internet – an Internet, which connected together hundreds of millions of PCs and many millions of servers. IPv4 was also used within organisations for internal networking – such networks being isolated for addressing purposes from the Internet. IPv6 is, in theory, the long term answer to the addressing problem and possibly a number of other problems. It is not a quick fix for an addressing problem but a genuine evolutionary upgrade to the protocol.

Consider security. You do not need to do much investigation to conclude that the big bad network out there is awash with hackers and crackers and various other bad guys, all of whom would like to engage in nefarious activity with your network.  IPv6 provides two security enhancements, which will act as obstacles for them. Under IPv6, an Authentication Header prevents unauthorized hosts from sending traffic to some destinations by obliging the sender to securely login to the receiver. This enhancement allows implementers to define the authentication algorithm. IPv6 also employs an Encapsulating Security Header enabling encryption of traffic between two hosts. This is also algorithm-independent. Security is regarded as being so important that you might not have to wait for IPv6 to get it – the IPv6 specifications allow the same features to be added to IPv4.

IPv6 is also provides for Mobile IP, which means the ability to assign a unique IP address to every mobile device. In actual fact it does this by providing autoconfiguration capabilities, which is good news for anyone who spends time configuring networks. IPv6 offers “stateful” autoconfiguration allowing servers to dynamically assign unique addresses to computers on request using a range of reserved values. For mobile it offers “stateless” autoconfiguration which allows servers to generate globally unique addresses by concatenating the local link address with an additional number.

IPv6 is also going to be able to be more aware of the traffic that it carries, being able to distinguish between, say, real time video feeds and regular email and hence able to select the right quality of line and error correction procedures for the traffic.

Very little of the technical story is going to be of much interest to the typical IT user, but the consequences of it all, will. If you just imagine a world of hundreds of millions of connected wireless devices (laptops, PDAs, MP3 players, etc.) and billions of connected things (cars, fridges, security cameras, etc.) and then imagine all the applications that might run between any of these devices involving or possibly without the involvement of human beings and the millions of servers out there then you have the landscape if not the detail.

Many of the applications of the future will simply not work over IPv4 and in time, the software producers are not going to even attempt to accommodate it. For this reason,
IT Departments cannot wait for IPv6 to happen to them, they need to plan for the future before it arrives and, as with the Y2K problem, this means all IT Departments. Also, just like the Y2k problem there will be a cost and there will be no immediate benefit to dealing with the problem beyond the fact that you’ll be able to continue to operate. Oh, and the consultant will make a killing…. I suspect.