Net big bang creates need for astronomical address system

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Published: 12:00am, 1 Feb 2005

The answer to ever-expanding connectivity, IPv6 is mind-boggling in its capacity and potential

IN THE NEXT few years, the available space for addresses on the internet will grow to an astronomical size. This technological feat will be enabled by IPv6 (internet protocol version 6), and although it will not replace IPv4, the existing standard, it will be able to handle a lot more addresses.

IPv4 was created more than 30 years ago, and as a 32-bit addressing system was designed to handle 4 billion addresses. Back then, nobody thought much about it; how could the world ever need more than four billion computers? That was before the big internet explosion. Now, of course, that 4 billion is disappearing fast.

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.'

This demand has led to the development of IPv6 to handle a few more devices than four billion. It uses 128-bit addressing. To understand just what that means, we can turn to the TCP/IP Guide (www.tcpipguide.com), an online reference source on TCP/IP protocol suite. The guide explained it like this: if the address space of IPv4 were represented by a 1.6 inch square, then the address area of IPv6 would be the size of the solar system.