The Hindu Business Line : Asian countries keyed in to IPv6

ASIA happens to be the most happening place for IPv6 - deployment of the sixth version of the Internet protocol. Especially Japan and China, which are all keyed in, even as the rest of the world is taking notice, says MIT Technology Review.

While the networking protocol is being largely ignored by American academia, the Japanese Government funded the KAME Project "to create a single solid software set" of IPv6 and related technologies.

KAME software has taken hold in Japan and large parts of the Japanese Internet backbone are running IPv6. In many ways it looks like the US is falling behind, says the Review.

IPv6 will be the biggest, the most drastic, and the most comprehensive change to the underlying structure of the Internet in more than 20 years. The redeployment will require the reconfiguration of more than 100 million computers.

But when the IPv6 rollout is finally done, not all the effects will be positive: the new Version 6 Internet will be slower, more friendly to peer-to-peer-based copyright violation systems, and the computers on it will almost certainly be less secure.

IPv6 is already happening in other ways, too. The code that lets computers talk on an IPv6-enabled network is now built into the current versions of Windows XP, MacOS, Linux, and many forms of Unix. Every router made by Cisco comes ready to run IPv6. So does every Nokia mobile phone.

So what is IPv6 anyway, and why does it matter?

Today's Internet uses IPv4, the 4th version of the Internet Protocol. The result of this decision made nearly 30 years ago is that the Internet simply cannot handle more than 232 or 4,294,967,296 devices. For a variety of technical reasons, the actual number of devices is a lot smaller than that - far closer to two billion, in fact.

The most important thing that IPv6 does is quadruple the size of the Internet address field from 32 bits to 128 bits.

The switchover will result in roughly 5,000 addresses for every square micrometer of the Earth's surface.

There are so many IPv6 addresses that humanity will never run out of them.