International IP 6 Day

2nd February 2011 :: Author: Andrew Cope, Managing Director, Evergreen

Not many people across the globe are aware of IP 6 Day, or what an IP is full stop. IP is an acronym for Internet Protocol. Without going into too much technical jargon, each person connected to the internet has an Internet Protocol Address (IP Address as it is widely known). As you can imagine the number of people and services connected to the internet continues to grow an exponential rate and basically the world is running out of addresses for all of these new connections. So why IP 6? Currently, an IP Address is made up of 4 sets of numbers. You may have seen

something like 192.168.0.1. Each number in this address can be a maximum of 255, I won’t go into why this limit exists, we’d be here all day. This current numbering system allows for approximately 4.2 billion internet connections worldwide. IP 6 will add another two sets of digits to the front of the current IP address thus giving around 274 trillion unique addresses. More than than number of stars in the known universe.

So, now you know what IP6 is, what is IP6 Day. On June 8th, Google, Face book and Yahoo will be giving IP6 ‘a trial’. The theory goes that ‘there should be no effect’ felt by the internet community  - watch this space, are we going to see a millennium bug frenzy all over again?

Here is a link to the Internet Society page for World IP6 Day