The internet is in transition, literally. Last week, on June 8, top websites and internet service providers including Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Cisco tried out Internet 2.0 for a day. Serving billions of users, these Web majors carried out a successful 24-hour global-scale trial of the new Internet Protocol, IPv6, to check for compatibility. The day-long trial was billed as one of the most important day for the future of the internet. In view of the increasing demand for Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and the global scarcity of IPv4 addresses (IPv4 is the current version of internet we are using at the moment), trying out the new protocol became a strong imperative to check for unforeseen problems and whether all users will still be able to connect on a medium on which the 21st century digital society will be built. Most importantly, the significance of the day was to build confidence.

Good news is that the vast majority of users were able to access services as usual with real-world IPv6 use under controlled conditions. Given the diversity of technology that powers the internet, the trial has shown that if you turn IPv6 on, the world will not collapse.

Suresh Hosakoppal, vice-president, service engineering and operations, Yahoo! India R&D says, ?Most Indian operators are readying their infrastructure to support IPv6 and are mostly in par with the global readiness. The government has made it mandatory to use IPv6 in infrastructure/application for all e-governance projects. All telecoms and internet service providers in India are required to be IPv6 compliant by end of 2011 and are required to serve there traffic on IPv6 thereafter.?

In India, the government is leading the effort of transitioning to IPv6 through the formation an IPv6 Task Force in public private partnership (PPP). India only has 18.5 million IPv4 addresses for a population of 1.2 billion people. The formation of the task force and the deployment roadmap was approved by the government in July 2010. Actionable points of the roadmap include that all major service providers will target to handle IPv6 traffic and offer IPv6 services by December 2011, while all central and state government ministries and departments shall plan to start using IPv6 services by March 2012.

Anand Patil, vice-president (systems engineering), Cisco Systems India, says that India has a rapidly growing internet market, and an IP address is essential for internet connectivity. IPv4 addresses are getting exhausted at a fast rate both globally and in the India market. Further, the current version of the internet is facing several challenges which are impacting consumers and businesses alike. Some of the key challenges include?level of security on the network, eradicating spam and viruses, improving capacity of the network infrastructure, improving the efficiency of high-speed data transfer, improving the accuracy of search engines, building more efficient and high-capacity data centres, and reducing the unit cost of internet services.

?Scaling the network to meet an ever-expanding agenda of more users, more devices, more traffic, more services, and more policies is becoming extremely critical. What is missing in today?s network is an abundant supply of new addresses that will allow the network to scale up in size by a further factor of at least 1 million, and hopefully more than a billion-fold. Hence IPv6 adoption has become extremely important for us,? he says.

Manish Dalal, vice-president for the Asia Pacific region at Verisign, explains: ?Every device on the computer network is assigned an IP address, which is a numerical address that is its identity and forms the basis of internet communication. The current protocol IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses, which limits the IP address space to approximately 4.3 billion possible unique addresses.? He adds: ?While this number seemed sufficient at the time that IPv4 was developed in the early 1980s, it became apparent that this would be insufficient to accommodate continuing, exponential internet use and expansion. Today there are over a billion internet users and literally billions of internet-connected devices. In 2013, it is projected that there will be approximately 1 trillion devices connected to the internet.?

Early this year, the clock finally reached zero with the last available IPv4 addresses within the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) pool being allocated. While the Regional Internet Registries (RIR s) to whom IANA allocates IP addresses, which in turn provide them to ISPs, still have IPv4 addresses in their inventory, no new IPv4 addresses can be created. APNIC (Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre), the regional Internet registry for Asia-Pacific was the first to announce in mid April 2011 that it had reached the last block of addresses in its available pool, he reveals.

IPv6 solves the problem of IPv4 address saturation by using 128-bit addressing, creating a massively larger number of IP addresses??340 trillion trillion trillion??widely believed to be more than the internet will need for decades, even by the most ambitious growth projections. A Nokia Siemens Networks official says, ?IPv6 will not only solve the current address problem, but it will also allow service providers to offer services for a new breed of mobile and fixed devices, which are connected to the internet all the time. The emerging space of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications such as Smart Grid is a good example.?

Suresh Hosakoppal at Yahoo! India R&D says, ?The address space used by IPv4 is expected to run out by the year end. The current version provides an approximate 4.3 billion unique address spaces. These unique address spaces are assigned to individual devices/users in the public Internet Domain and enable them to communicate with one another. Once the address are exhausted, we will not be able to add more devices in the public domains limiting the growth.? Exhaustion of IPV4 addresses will impact all activities related to the internet.

It is evident that the internet is at the brink of yet another revolution?the conversion from IPv4 to IPv6. As IPv6 prepares to make its debut after almost two decades in preparation, transitioning to the new protocol is the only option to ensure long-term business continuity.