One year ago a distributed DNS and content delivery network startup called CloudFlare launched at a TechCrunch event. It didn't win. ReadWriteWeb's Frederic Lardinois wrote about its promise to "speed up your website by an average of 30% and dramatically decrease your bandwidth usage and server load by preventing spam bots and other attackers from reaching your site." He said it had the potential to become a highly disruptive company.

One year later, CloudFlare now says it serves up 15 billion web pages every month to 350 million people. That's a whole lot of people - and it makes a whole lot of things possible. Some of those things began happening this week.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

What do you do with a shiny new, globally distributed network capable of serving up billions of web pages? CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince, a graduate of Trinity College, Harvard Business School and the University of Chicago law school, decided his company was in a great position to build a bridge between the IPv4 web, which hit capacity earlier this year, and the incompatible Internet of the future, IPv6.

Prince says the scarcity of new globally compatible IP adresses in some parts of the world has already caused the price of basic web hosting to soar beyond what independent innovators can afford to pay for the experiments that will define the future of the internet.

Saving the World's $9 Web Hosting

As the world runs out of IPv4 adresses and is forced to switch over to the much larger but incompatible world of IPv6, CloudFlare says it's built a solution in its global network of distributed but newly built network connectivity. Called an Automatic IPv6 Gateway, the free service became available yesterday to website owners and will be made available to web hosts soon.

Photo of CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince by Max Whittaker for TechCrunch.

Prince says that prices for IPv4 adresses have skyrocketed in Asia, where only a hoarded few remain available for sale from web hosts to their customers. There are a near infinite number of IPv6 IP adresses available, but you can't get to those from the IPv4 web that everyone lives on today. By providing a free IPv6 gateway, CloudFlare says it will enable web hosts to sell inexpensive hosting to customers again while still allowing those customers to interact with the rest of the web.

Prince says that eliminating the price-inflating scarcity of IP adresses in Asia is essential to the existence of a market that supports low-cost experimentation online and thus to global innovation. "The world needs $9 per month web hosting," he says, "and the experiments built on that affordable level of service need to be accessible by the rest of the web."

I Heard You Like Internet in Your Internet

You could presume that this is an opportunistic move by the year-old company, but it sounds smart and generally beneficial to me. It's reminiscent of Amazon's taking its giant cloud infrastructure built to support eCommerce and making it available as a pure cloud service to outside developers. CloudFlare blew up by offering to handle traffic management for website owners in the cloud, as a service, and through its success now has a network it can leverage to do IPv6 translation.

It all brings Amazon's Kindle Fire and Silk browser back to mind, though there are some major issues with the idea of running the whole internet through Amazon servers so it can be served up super fast to tablets - Amazon has also proven that it can find amazing ways to use surplus network capacity. Ironically, Prince posted on Twitter this evening that he thought Silk "is great idea but will face technical (mis-caching), legal (copyright) & privacy concerns."

Hopefully it's a virtuous circle whenever anyone's cloud service enables a whole new level of cloud services to be built on top of the capacity they built to fill the original market demand. Perhaps all of us should be asking ourselves: what market demand could I fill that would enable me to create surplus capacity that could then become the basis of entirely new service offerings? If that new offering happens to help solve a gnarly, expensive, debilitating and unavoidable problem like the end of IPv4 - then perhaps there is no longer a mystery step between hoarding underpants and profit.

What of the high degree of centralization that such a bridge creates? Is CloudFlare a company that the whole world should feel comfortable sending its web traffic through? Prince says that just as it takes 5 minutes for customers to get onboard CloudFlare's service, it takes even less time to get off of it. So it would be contrary to the company's interests not to act in their customers' best interests. Prince also cites his 8 years of adjunct professorship in Internet Law at Chicago's John Marshall University as reason to trust him. He's also spent the last 10 years working in the anti-spam industry and advised governments around the world on the subject.

IT departments are so appreciative of what CloudFlare does, says the company's CEO, that CloudFlare can do a whole lot of it for free. Enough of those free users convert to paying customers that things are working out just fine for the year-old company.

When a world, no a galaxy, of new devices come online in the next few years - the demand for new IP addresses will be all the greater. The IPv6 system is set up and ready for that - but the rest of us aren't without investments in IPv4 to IPv6 translation technology that are far too expensive for most individual companies participating on the internet today. Prince's company has rapidly built up the infrastructure to swallow those costs and offer the technology needed as a service in the cloud. For free.

I think it's correct to call that potentially disruptive.

One year ago a distributed DNS and content delivery network startup called CloudFlare launched at a TechCrunch event. It didn't win. ReadWriteWeb's Frederic Lardinois wrote about its promise to "speed up your website by an average of 30% and dramatically decrease your bandwidth usage and server load by preventing spam bots and other attackers from reaching your site." He said it had the potential to become a highly disruptive company.

One year later, CloudFlare now says it serves up 15 billion web pages every month to 350 million people. That's a whole lot of people - and it makes a whole lot of things possible. Some of those things began happening this week.

Prince says the scarcity of new globally compatible IP adresses in some parts of the world has already caused the price of basic web hosting to soar beyond what independent innovators can afford to pay for the experiments that will define the future of the internet.

Saving the World's $9 Web Hosting

As the world runs out of IPv4 adresses and is forced to switch over to the much larger but incompatible world of IPv6, CloudFlare says it's built a solution in its global network of distributed but newly built network connectivity. Called an Automatic IPv6 Gateway, the free service became available yesterday to website owners and will be made available to web hosts soon.

Prince says that prices for IPv4 adresses have skyrocketed in Asia, where only a hoarded few remain available for sale from web hosts to their customers. There are a near infinite number of IPv6 IP adresses available, but you can't get to those from the IPv4 web that everyone lives on today. By providing a free IPv6 gateway, CloudFlare says it will enable web hosts to sell inexpensive hosting to customers again while still allowing those customers to interact with the rest of the web.

Prince says that eliminating the price-inflating scarcity of IP adresses in Asia is essential to the existence of a market that supports low-cost experimentation online and thus to global innovation. "The world needs $9 per month web hosting," he says, "and the experiments built on that affordable level of service need to be accessible by the rest of the web."

I Heard You Like Internet in Your Internet

You could presume that this is an opportunistic move by the year-old company, but it sounds smart and generally beneficial to me. It's reminiscent of Amazon's taking its giant cloud infrastructure built to support eCommerce and making it available as a pure cloud service to outside developers. CloudFlare blew up by offering to handle traffic management for website owners in the cloud, as a service, and through its success now has a network it can leverage to do IPv6 translation.

It all brings Amazon's Kindle Fire and Silk browser back to mind - though there are some major issues with the idea of running the whole internet through Amazon servers so it can be served up super fast to tablets - Amazon has also proven that it can find amazing ways to use surplus network capacity. (Ironically, Prince posted on Twitter this evening that he thought Silk "is great idea but will face technical (mis-caching), legal (copyright) & privacy concerns.")

Hopefully it's a virtuous circle whenever anyone's cloud service enables a whole new level of cloud services to be built on top of the capacity they built to fill the original market demand. Perhaps all of us should be asking ourselves: what market demand could I fill that would enable me to create surplus capacity that could then become the basis of entirely new service offerings? If that new offering happens to help solve a gnarly, expensive, debilitating and unavoidable problem like the end of IPv4 - then perhaps there is no longer a mystery step between hoarding underpants and profit.

What of the high degree of centralization that such a bridge creates? Is CloudFlare a company that the whole world should feel comfortable sending its web traffic through? Prince says that just as it takes 5 minutes for customers to get onboard CloudFlare's service, it takes even less time to get off of it. So it would be contrary to the company's interests not to act in their customers' best interests. Prince also cites his 8 years of adjunct professorship in Internet Law at Chicago's John Marshall University as reason to trust him. He's also spent the last 10 years working in the anti-spam industry and advised governments around the world on the subject.

IT departments are so appreciative of what CloudFlare does, says the company's CEO, that CloudFlare can do a whole lot of it for free. Enough of those free users convert to paying customers that things are working out just fine for the year-old company.

When a world, no a galaxy, of new devices come online in the next few years - the demand for new IP addresses will be all the greater. The IPv6 system is set up and ready for that - but the rest of us aren't without investments in IPv4 to IPv6 translation technology that are far too expensive for most individual companies participating on the internet today. Prince's company has rapidly built up the infrastructure to swallow those costs and offer the technology needed as a service in the cloud. For free.

I think it's correct to call that potentially disruptive.

At a ceremony this morning in Florida, the last block of IPv4 addresses were allocated to the Regional Internet Registries, whose job it is to further distribute these final addresses to others.

Today's announcement has been anticipated for quite some time, as the explosion of Internet-enabled devices and the growing number of Internet users has accelerated the demand for IP addresses.

Fear not: There's IPv6

Lest cries of "the Internet is running out of room!" sound like the uproad surrounding Y2K ("everything is going to break!"), average Internet customers don't need to panic about today's announcement. While the last block of IPv4 addresses have been allocated to regional registries, they do still have some to distribute. And there are millions of unused IPv4 addresses.

But those won't last, and it's now up to the Internet to make the switch from IPv4 to IPv6. IPv6 jumps from 32- to 128-bit, which will give an almost unlimited number of addresses.

The Difficult Transition

But making the switch isn't easy. Even though IPv6 was standardized more than a decade ago, there has been no real incentive to upgrade networks' compatibility - until now.

As Dave Thaler, software architect at Microsoft and Internet Engineer Task Force (IETF) co-chair, tells Ars Technica, "The IETF has actually been preparing for this day for a long time. ... [W]e've developed transition technologies to ease the transition to IPv6, while also looking at the impact of carrier-grade NATs [network address translations]. In short, the depletion of the IANA IPv4 address pool is not a crisis, and will not have any notable short-term effects."

But with the allocation of the last block of IPv4 addresses today, the move to IPv6 just got a little bit more urgent. To help make the transition easier, many major technology companies - including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo - will be participating in World IPv6 Day later this year, a test to make sure their systems are ready to make the switch.

This week we discuss the impending Internet address apocalypse, RFID's sweet spot, why the U.S. is behind China on IoT, emotional sensors, and more!

In July last year, we reported that the Internet will run out of Internet addresses in about 1 year's time. Well now it's down to 11 days, according to the Twitter account @ipv4countdown (data sourced from Hurricane Electric).

We're talking about IPv4 addresses, Internet Protocol version 4. There is a new version, IPv6, but it requires work from ISPs and others to enable it. The reason why this is important is that the Internet of Things is leading to a huge increase in IP addresses. Basically, every object connected to the Internet requires at least one IP address. So the adoption of IPv6 is a key technology in the Internet of Things.

RFID: Retail is the Sweet Spot

According to a report on WTN News, demand for RFID will continue to mature in 2011 - especially in the retail, healthcare, banking/financial and aerospace sectors. Joe Pleshek wrote:

"Retail [...] is currently the sweet spot for RFID, especially with apparel retailers, who are applying RFID to individual garments to limit out -of-stocks, reduce shrink and re-direct labor from the back room to more customer-facing roles."

Drew Nathanson, senior RFID analyst and director of research operations at VDC Research Group, expects the retail industry to consume at least 3.4 billion RFID tags by 2014 - up from 400 million in 2011.

Sensors Getting Better: Emotional Sensors

An interesting report from MobiHealthNews this week discusses the latest in sensor innovation. According to Dr. Joseph Kvedar, director of the Center for Connected Health at Partners HealthCare System in Boston, an area to keep an eye on in sensor technology is what he calls "non-physiologic" sensors. By that he means sensors that are not measuring something physical. He cited a couple of products that do emotional sensing: Cogito has a product that can predict mood by sensing a user's voice over the phone; and Affectiva has technology to pick up a person's emotional state either by facial recognition or by a more traditional armband sensor (see image to the right, via MobiHealthNews).

Kvedar noted that "we've had too limited of a view of what we can collect from patients remotely and these emotional sensors add a whole new dimension to the objective data part of the connected health story."

Why the U.S. is Behind China in IoT

We've reported on the China government's forward thinking in the Internet of Things. In a recent post by Ron Callari on the blog inventorspot.com, Robert Kong Hai, an American writer and author living in China, neatly summarized why the U.S. is falling behind China:

"You can't rely on the US government to push this technology. It's the private sector that has to step up. Remember, in China it's the total opposite. The government jumps in and the private sector take cues from the government."

Kinect may be the Key to Control Your Internet of Things

Earlier this week we reported that Microsoft is preparing an official Software Developement Kit (SDK) that will let 3rd parties build any Windows software to include Kinect control support. Kinect is a motion-control interface for games, much like Nintendo's Wii system. This has implications for all Internet-enabled objects in your household. Forrester analyst James McQuivey said at the end of last year that "Kinect is to multitouch user interfaces what the mouse was to DOS." He expects Kinect to be "a transformative change in the user experience, the interposition of a new and dramatically natural way to interact -- not just with TV, not just with computers -- but with every machine that we will conceive of in the future..."

New AMD Chips Enable Visual Computing in Embedded Systems

Mike Vizard at CTOEdge reported this week that "the world of embedded systems is going to get a whole lot more visually-oriented." He pointed to Advanced Micro Devices unveiling its G-Series of accelerated processing units (APUs). These add graphics functionality into an embedded processor, which can be deployed almost anywhere. Vizard noted that Microsoft uses AMD processors in its Surface systems, the touch-screen table interface.

"According to Cameron Swen, senior product marketing manager for AMD's embedded solutions division, the world of embedded systems is about to become more visual because people want to interact with these systems, whether they are deployed on a factory floor or your living room. That means these systems will increasingly need to support touchscreen interfaces that allow customers to manipulate graphical images."

Connect Your Mailbox to the Internet

We're not talking about your inbox, we mean Ye Olde Mailbox - you know, where all your bills get delivered. As RWW's Mike Melanson reported today, Make Magazine has hacked together a system that sends push notifications to your iPhone every time a letter arrives. The project uses a switch in the mailbox to sense whenever the door is opened.

That's a summary of some Internet of Things highlights from the past week. Feel free to share in the comments other interesting Internet of Things developments that you spotted this week.

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.

Well, something is very, very wrong. We are quickly running out of IPv4 addresses, and what this means is that, simply put, the Internet will be clogged. It will not be possible to add new devices to it, no new computers, mobile phones, consumers, corporate users, nothing in addition of what is already connected.

The projections are for the last sizable chunks of numbers to be allocated to providers around May 2011, who then will hand them out, at ever diminishing rates to their customers.

If you are an individual, it will be of course the responsibility of your provider (the Comcasts, Verizons, if you are in the US, or BTs, for example, if you are in the U.K.), to make sure that your new cable modem, or next year's iPhone model will keep working. And if you trust them, you can stop reading. But if you are a corporate user, or if you think that an additional voice being heard actually matters, then keep reading!

Vint Cerf, the father of the Internet, is now employed by Google with the title of Evangelist, to go around the planet and raise awareness about the numerous issues that surround the healthy development of his creation. He was in the U.K. yesterday, and somebody on Facebook commented "ah, that's why he wasn't in China at an other meeting he was expected to attend" to talk at the launch of 6UK.

Here is a video of Vint's talk:

6UK is is a not-for-profit membership organization that helps the U.K. secure every competitive advantage available from the rapid adoption of the new Internet protocol, and to make sure no segment of U.K. industry and the wider society gets left behind.

A worthy goal - even more so if you consider that, according to a research by Google, the Internet generated over £100 billion worth of business last year in the U.K., contributing to over 7% of its GDP. David Cameron, the Prime Minister of the U.K. announced that his government wants to build and deploy within 2015 the best, and fastest broadband network in Europe.

Neither the business, nor the network can happen if the transition to IPv6 doesn't happen in a planned, orderly fashion.

Address translation and address trading are useful for extending the use of IPv4 as temporary measures.

The transition has to be done in a planned way, and not in a panic. Even if among 6UK's stakeholders there is BIS, a department of the Ministry of Communication, there is no direct government intervention being planned, with the government only providing guidance, and leadership (and as explicitly mentioned in the conference, substantial incentives through its purchases), and the private sector must recognize that the migration is in its own best interest.

The Internet is already everywhere, and it is becoming even more widespread with the development of Internet of Things applications. Neelie Kroes, the Commissioner responsible for the EU's Digital Agenda, wants all cars to be Internet-connected.

The migration from IPv4 to IPv6 will be a long process, and through temporary technical solutions like address translation, and NAT (hated kludges complicating the networks, and making the development of exciting and disruptive applications like Skype more difficult) the two can and will coexist.

Won't the same problem present itself again with IPv6 also running out of available space? Well, never say never, but it will be a long time certainly before that happens. The available range of IPv6 numbers, three hundred forty undecillion (thanks, Wolfram | Alpha!), is so large, that it is difficult to find analogies to make any sense of it.

So here's my attempt, let me know if I succeeded. Instead of struggling to go beyond assigning a unique IP number as needed to merely a few billion mobile phones and computers, let's be more ambitious, and squander the new abundance. Let's assign a unique IP number to each cell in the human body! You'd think we'd run quickly out, but not so: we'd be able to manage a septillion (one million billion billion) humans... And without resorting to NAT!

Are you eager to start to do something? Head over to www.ipv6actnow.org to learn what you can do today!

Photo by thesaint

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.

Why a New Internet Protocol is Needed

Currently the Web largely uses IPv4, Internet Protocol version 4. Each IPv4 address is limited to a 32-bit number, which means there are a maximum of just over 4 billion unique addresses. IPv6 is the next generation Internet Protocol and uses a 128-bit address, so it supports a vastly larger number of unique addresses. Enough, in fact, to give every person on the planet over 4 billion addresses! Update: Dave Evans, Chief Technologist of the Internet Business Solutions Group at Cisco, wrote in to advise that "it's closer to 50 thousand trillion trillion addresses per person." (reference)

John Curran from ARIN, the non-profit responsible for managing the distribution of Internet addresses in the North American region, told ReadWriteWeb that of the approximately 4 billion IPv4 addresses available, all but 6% have already been allocated. Curran expects the final 6% to be allocated over the coming year.

This is largely an issue that ISP (Internet Service Providers) and telecoms carriers need to deal with. However content service providers, including large-scale Internet companies like Google and Facebook, also need to ensure that the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 takes place. Curran explained that a content company like Google (for example its YouTube operation) will need to work with its ISP to transport the content via IPv6 as well as IPv4.

This transition is happening "slowly," says Curran. But he warns that "deployment is where we're behind."

Google, Facebook & Others Making Good Progress

John Curran told us that large carriers like Verizon and Comcast have announced trial IPv6 activity. Curran also noted that new Internet of Things initiatives that use sensor networks, power grids, RFID and similar technologies, are being directed to use IPv6 and not IPv4.

There is also solid support from the big Internet companies. Curran said that Google has already put the majority of its services onto IPv6. Declaring its support for IPv6 on a special webpage, Google states that "IPv6 is essential to the continued health and openness of the Internet [and] will enable innovation and allow the Internet's continued growth."

In June, Google held a Google IPv6 Implementors Conference. At that event, Facebook announced that it had begun to use IPv6.

In his opening remarks to the conference, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf urges ISPs to move to IPv6, so that a "black market" for Internet addresses won't occur.

Another Y2K?

Critics view some of the push for IPv6 as Chicken Little 'the sky is falling' talk. Commented @ajbraun, a self-described technology leader at Sony Ericsson, via Twitter: "We should call this "IPv6: Y2K II." An obvious issue for 10 years, we will panic at the end and finally much ado about nothing."

Others see a technology called NAT (Network Address Translation) as a solution - it maps multiple addresses to a single IP address, thus reducing the amount of unique IP addresses required. However this is at best a temporary solution. Google argued back in 2008 that NAT and similar technologies "complicate the Internet's architecture, pose barriers to the development of new applications, and run contrary to network openness principles."

Whether or not there is Y2K-style fear mongering, the bottom line is that IPv6 is a much larger platform for the coming Internet of Things. So one way or another, the move will have to be made.

"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.

1. Users in developed nations employ multiple devices to access the Internet including mobile phones, laptops, desktops and servers, all of which require individual addresses; the trend is towards even more Internet-enabled devices such as TVs, game consoles and media players
2. Growing numbers of new users from developing nations such as China, India, and Brazil, amplified by the emphasis on mobile Internet access in many countries without good telecommunications infrastructure
3. The Internet of Things is increasing the pressure to provide connectivity, including smart grids for electricity, water and other utility services

The group promotes a newer technology, IPv6, which they say would facilitate over four billion addresses for every person on the planet. This is because unlike the current protocol, which uses 32-bit addresses, IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses.

One of the primary concerns when it comes to dwindling availability of IP addresses under the current protocol is the effect on the economy.

"Without IPv6," says the group, "new start-up businesses wishing to offer services on the Internet will find it very difficult or prohibitively expensive to secure globally routable addresses for new services, such as eCommerce websites. Addresses may even become a black market commodity, which could be a massive hurdle for businesses and would significantly slow Internet growth."

Some governmental and commercial outfits, in Europe and especially Asia, have begun to run the new protocol. It is far from being universally embraced, however. To do so requires running the two systems in tandem for a while on a large scale. That, in turn, introduces the complicating issue of cost in a time when neither public nor private groups find themselves with a lot of liquidity. From changing firewalls to cable modems, this is not a light undertaking.

What do you think? Is this an urgent issue or an eventual one? Or is it over-hyped altogether? If it is a necessary change, what is the best way to switch over?

Dublin Castle photo by GLIC

With the number of Internet-enabled devices particularly mobile phones soaring, very few IP addresses remain vacant, and with only about 20 per cent of the world connected to the Net, that's a problem. And consumers, if you think this doesn't affect you, think again. That latest gadget you bought - is it IPv6 compatible?

To fully understand IPv6 we need to take a look at TCP/IP and this means a quick trip back in time.

It all started way back in 1969, when the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was using a transmission protocol known as the Network Control Protocol(NCP) to transmit data across networks. Protocols, if you think of them as languages, are needed so that networks and computers can talk to one another.

Expensive, cumbersome and slow, NCP was found to be limiting and in 1973, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated a research program, known as the Internetting project, to develop a better communication protocol.

The networks which emerged from this research became the basis for what we know as the Internet, and the protocols developed during this time became known as the TCP/IP Protocol Suite.

At its most basic level, the IP part ensured packets were routed to the right place by providing unique identifying numbers to all hosts connecting to the network, and the TCP part managed the transfer of that data.

On January 1, 1983 NCP was deemed obsolete when the ARPANET switched over to the new TCP/IP protocol suite, and as a result, marked this date as the official birth date [for some] of the Internet.

Getting to V1 from V6

According to the Living Internet, after Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn designed TCP/IP, DARPA contracted with three sites to develop operational versions: BBN, Stanford and the University College London, and four increasingly better versions of TCP/IP were developed: TCPv1, TCPv2, which then split into TCPv3 and IPv3. Stability finally arrived with TCPv4 and IPv4; the standard protocol we know and use today.

IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses, which limits the address space to 4,294,967,296 (232) possible unique addresses. But, as some of these are reserved for specific purposes, it reduces the total number available.

IPv6 with its 128 bit addresses increases the number of potential unique addresses to 3.4e+38 (a little bit more than 340 trillion, trillion, trillion). Additionally, it is designed to rectify issues found with IPv4 such as data security.

IPv6 is expected to slowly replace IPv4, with the two protocol systems expected to run simultaneously for many years.

But, what happened to IPv5?

Typically, the most often asked question when talking about IPv4 and IPv6 is what happened to IPv5? IPv5 was known as an experimental streaming audio/video protocol. According to Raffi Krikorian, a protocol named ST, the Internet Stream Protocol was created in the late 1970's and two decades later revised to become ST2, at which point it was implemented in commercial projects by IBM, NeXT, Apple and Sun. ST and ST2 were already given that magical "5" notes Krikorian. Given it had little to do with the fundamental structure of IP addressing, IPv5 is not commonly recognized.

We're running out of IP addresses

While the establishment of a single networking protocol was an important step toward maintaining order in the then new internetworked world, no one could have guessed the growth of the Internet, nor the number of IP addresses required to cover the ever growing demand.

"My only defense is that decision was made in 1977, at a time when it was uncertain if the Internet would work," Cerf said recently, adding that a "128-bit address space seemed excessive back then."

Watch our video below to get Cerf's take on IPv6 - and why switching over is so important.

Recorded at SMX West 2009 by ReadWriteWeb
Vint Cerf image: Vint Cerf playing Spacewar on PDP-1
Credit: Flickr Joi