World IPv6 Launch Day Is Key for the Internet of Things

With today’s celebration of World IPv6 Launch 2012, the Internet is doing something new: growing. And that growth comes none too soon as the rise of the Internet of Things places unprecedented new demands on worldwide Internet infrastructure.

Google, Yahoo and Facebook are amongst the leaders in the growing charge to adopt the critically needed Internet addressing system known as IPv6, which is generally reagarded as the viable only solution for the stagnation of the Internet.

World IPv6 Launch 2012 brings together “major Internet service providers (ISPs), home networking equipment manufacturers and web companies around the world… to permanently enable IPv6 for their products and services,” starting today.

Here’s why, by the numbers:

In 1973, when Vint Cerf and his team put together the networking rules for what would become the Internet, they used an addressing system with 32 bits of addressing space – the well-known 192.X.X.X IPv4 system in use today. This gave the fledgling Internet the capacity for 4.3 billion individual addresses; far more than Cerf and his team could even conceive of needing back then.

Severely Mis-Underestimated

Obviously, Cerf and everyone else severely underestimated the growth of the Internet and all the various ways it would be used. More than just a system to share files and images, the Internet has become a platform for commerce and communication that eventually dwarfed the telephone network, the only comparable network on the planet.

That growth has led us to the problem we have today. According to Cerf – who took part in a Google Hangout Tuesday afternoon, there are currently 5.5 billion mobile devices in the world. If each one of them were to need an IP address (and that’s likely to be true in the very near future), they alone would require more than the available Internet addresses under IPv4. New devices simply would not be able to connect.

Fortunately Cerf and others saw this bottleneck coming. In 1996 they put together a new addressing protocol, IPv6, with 128 bits of address space. That means IPv6 can accommodate 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses. That should be enough for a while.

But the transition to IPv6 has been slow, as many organizations hesitate to make the needed efforts.