Alec Yu, managing director of Allied Telesyn North Asia, said the speed with which the internet had grown had been extraordinary.

'This huge growth in the use of the internet has led to an increased demand for better, faster technology, as well as an increase in the demand for addresses from which to send and receive information,' he said. 'And, as interest in the World Wide Web continues to grow in the world's developing nations, the demand on the internet's resources will also increase.'

Such an extraordinarily large addressing system has enormous implications. Mr Yu believed the commercial use of the new system could be considerable.

'The commercial opportunities IPv6 provides for wireless devices, peer-to-peer networking, and the smart home is another driving force for the new technology,' he said. 'The wireless market requires a low latency, always on, auto-roaming, always-reachable IP service.

'Peer-to-peer networking enables groups of computers to communicate directly, avoiding the expense and delay of pushing an enormous amount of traffic through a central server. Peer-to-peer networking is used for online games, IP-telephony, video-conferencing and other business models,' he said.

We can expect to see connectivity we had not thought of before. 'Other opportunities for smart-home products, such as internet-enabled automobiles, security systems, and kitchen appliances are also pushing the transition to IPv6,' he said.

Not many experts believe it will be easy to move from IPv4 to IPv6.

Mark Webb-Johnson has been engaged in low-level systems programming in Hong Kong for several decades. As chief technology officer at the Network Box, a local company that specialises in network security, he has been thinking a lot about the implications of IPv6.

There is little doubt in his mind that both IPv4 and IPv6 will have to work together for a long time.

'Both networks will have to co-exist for some time. This is not something that can be switched to overnight. I see a gradual roll out of more IPv6 networks, with ISPs offering IPv4 or IPv6 address space. The IPv6 networks will be gatewayed on to IPv4 to permit basic interconnectivity,' he said.

A big issue is that a great deal of software must be upgraded as well as servers and routers.

'The main problem with implementing it is complexity. Software systems have to be updated. Servers, workstations and applications have to support it. There is still a lot of software out there that does not support it,' he said.

One interesting aspect to the push for IPv6 is that much of the pressure to change comes from Asia. Mr Yu said Asia and Europe were leading the charge to move to the new technology.

'In some countries, the pressures associated with address depletion - combined with new commercial opportunities - have resulted in governments mandating a move to IPv6,' he said. 'The European Commission and the Japanese, Taiwanese, and Korean governments have mandated the move, and other Asian countries are pushing the new technology as well.

'The United States has been somewhat slower to accept IPv6, although the US Department of Defence has indicated it aims to complete its transition by 2008.'

As we begin to connect everything (including 'the refrigerator, toaster, oven and cat', as Mr Webb-Johnson says), the issues of security and transition loom. It will not be the kind of problem Y2K presented because there is no absolute deadline as there was at the turn of the century. Nevertheless, such major changes in the framework of how the internet works will have to be handled with considerable care. There is certainly no stopping it.

There will be surprises we did not anticipate, but once everything is connected, we can expect our lives to change radically.

How big is IPv6?

If the address space of IPv4 was represented by a 1.6 inch square, the IPv6 would be represented by a square the size of the solar system.

Since IPv6 addresses are 128 bits long, the theoretical address space if all addresses wre used is 2 128 addresses or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456.

IPv6 has enough addresses for many trillions of addresses to be assigned to every human being on the planet

The earth is about 4.5 billion years old. If we had been assigning IPv6 addresses at a rate of 1 billion per second since the earth was formed, we would have by now used up less than one trillionth of the address space.