The Business Internet and Intranets:

IP was a highly pragmatic approach to dealing with the many data communication problems that in the 1970s restricted networks to expensive and slow transmission between a limited number of computer types. Twenty years after its conception, IP is showing its age. It was defined with the simple goal of interconnecting any number of computers, regardless of type and location, to enable them to send and receive flows of digital bits - that is, the Internet was planned as a giant phone system for a million or so computers. Issues of security, reliability, and guaranteed delivery were secondary to just getting the bits through the Net. Now, however, the need is to interconnect the world's billions of people and many millions or even hundreds of millions of computers and other devices. When cars, coffee pots, cameras, or digital cellular phones can all be Internet devices, more Internet addresses are needed than IP can provide.

In response to this recent explosion in the number of devices on the Net and the number of types of computer network applications, the Internet Engineering Task Force conceived the next generation of the Internet Protocol, IPng. (The IETF is an informal organization of no legal force that supervises the evolution of the Internet's core technology infrastructures.) IPng, the technical name for which is Ipv6, or IP version 6, is scheduled for implementation in 1998.

IPng will offer much needed enhancements over the current IP (also known as IPv4, or IP version 4), assuring the Internet's growth in size and providing new capabilities critical to its worldwide commercialization. In addition to an expanded addressing scheme, it will add security enhancements (essential for commerce and intra-organizational applications) and features such as multicasting (the ability to direct messages simultaneously to multiple locations without having to send a copy to every address).

The current IPv4 addressing scheme limits the address number of an Internet device to a length of 32 digital bits, which mathematically should allow it to handle more than four billion different addresses (2³²). This may appear to be a large enough number to handle the next few years' growth, given that in mid-1997 around forty million devices were connected to the Net. As noted above, however, the addressing IPv4 was wasteful of its numbers, frequently leaving large gaps of unused ones; a large company needing only a few thousand unique IP addresses might automatically tie up about sixteen million. A recent stop-gap solution allowed reassignment of unclaimed addresses, giving the system some breathing room.

How much time does IPv4 have left? With the current addressing schemes, it is estimated that it will probably collapse somewhere between the years 1000 and 2018. The Internet world is, therefore, waiting for IPng, if not with bated breath, then at least with fingers crossed. The transition from IPv4 to IPv6 should be fairly routine, although the very scale of the venture is sure to result in glitches somewhere. IPng is designed to provide a natural evolution from IPv4 and can be installed as a normal software upgrade in Internet devices. It is "interoperable" with IPv4 and can coexist with it for many years. It is also designed to run more efficiently on high performance networks while remaining efficient on low speed ones.

With the new addressing capabilities, IPv6 will increase IP addresses from 32 bits to 128 bits, allowing it to support a trillion device connections by 2020. Given that the world's population in 2020 will be eight billion, this will produce a ratio of 125 connections per human. When you count all the telephone systems, toasters, televisions, gas pumps, air conditioning units, vending machines, and other devices likely to be connected to the Internet, 125 connections per person may not be a farfetched number twenty years from now. ⁴³

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