ReadWriteWeb

Are you ready for IPv6? Did you know you'd better soon be ready? Is your ISP, or even country ready, and do they know why?

If you don't even know what IPv6 is, you are not alone. There are billions of people who don't know, and they shouldn't, since this fundamental protocol - IPv6 being the latest version of IP, invented in the 1970s by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn - is so deeply buried in the Internet services we use every day that when you are forced to see it, you know something is very, very wrong.

The Internet will run out of Internet addresses in about 1 year's time, we were told today by John Curran, President and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN). The same thing was also stated recently by Vint Cerf, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist.

The main reason for the concern? There's an explosion of data about to happen to the Web - thanks largely to sensor data, smart grids, RFID and other Internet of Things data. Other reasons include the increase in mobile devices connecting to the Internet and the annual growth in user-generated content on the Web.

Today's Internet was built largely on the IPv4 or Internet Protocol version four, first introduced in 1980. Now, three decades on and with mobile Internet tracing a shining arc across the virtual firmament, the Internet is running out of available IP addresses. So maintain the 130 delegates to the IPv6 Summit in Ireland, meeting today at Dublin Castle.

"Despite having nearly four and a half billion addresses, predications estimate that IPv4 will reach maximum capacity by September 2011," according to Irish IPv6 Task Force chair, Mícheál Ó Foghlú.