Categories: Web

World IPv6 Launch – this time it’s for real

Tomorrow, June 6, is World IPv6 Launch day – the date at which the internet’s biggest vested participants have agreed to permanently enable IPv6 on their products and services to ensure the internet’s “continued growth as a platform for innovation and economic development”.

In just a few hours some of the internet’s biggest partners, including AT&T, Bing and Facebook, will permanently enable IPv6 on their products. This follows a successful one-day test period last summer. Thankfully for end users the transition to IPv6 will be seamless.

So what’s so important about IPv6? IPv6 is an acronym for internet protocol version six, the latest set of rules that govern how devices such as smartphones, laptops and just about anything connects to the internet. Each device that connects to the internet needs to be assigned an IP address – a unique numerical identifier – in order to communicate on the network.

IP addresses, however, are finite size – something which has become increasingly apparent in the last number of years as the number of internet-enabled devices continues to grow enormously. The current protocol, IPv4, has 4.2 billion possible addresses but nearly all of these have been exhausted. IPv6 on the other hand has about 340 billion billion billion billion or so, more than enough to keep us connected for the foreseeable future.

With 340 undecillion addresses the vision of an ‘internet of things’ also becomes more real, where every possible device or smart appliance, from bedside lamps to toasters, are assigned unique addresses that could be used to communicate and control over the internet.

World IPv6 Launch “represents a major milestone in the global deployment of IPv6”, although it’s only the start of a “new era of the IPv6-enabled internet”.

Albizu Garcia

Albizu Garcia is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gain -- a marketing technology company that automates the social media and content publishing workflow for agencies and social media managers, their clients and anyone working in teams.

Recent Posts

Teaching with tech: What’s changing and why It Matters (Brains Byte Back Podcast)

Teaching has changed a lot over the years, from chalkboards to laptops, from printed worksheets…

13 minutes ago

‘Enormously intrusive’ collaborative sensing is beneficial to society: WEF podcast

The massive city-wide surveillance that collaborative sensing requires is a tremendous temptation for tyrants: perspective…

4 days ago

AI set to transform Product Development Lifecycle with new software engineering workbench

Innovation in software can lay claim to the very solutions that today have become the…

7 days ago

The Sociable’s 50 Under 50 Enterprise Executives

Rising from a decade of economic ambiguity, technological disruption, and the lingering specter of a…

1 week ago

UN to create taskforce on ‘disinformation’ affecting its mandate: Global Risk Report

Addressing disinformation has little to do with getting to the truth and everything to do…

1 week ago

Horasis addresses global turbulence with assembly of influential leaders in São Paulo, Brazil this October

After many years of relative stability, it seems clear we are now in a period…

2 weeks ago