Are you ready for IPv6?

The SEO Berkshire team at Reading based agency Cayenne Red is getting ready, as are others, for what the industry are imaginatively calling IPv6. Which begs the question, are you ready for IPv6?

In case that question has caused you a mild bit of panic, let’s have a quick look at the latest news about this newest development on the inner workings on the internet.

The leading internet companies have all agreed that 6^th June, 2012, is going to be an auspicious day which sees the launch, listen to the drum roll, of IPv6.

Hurray you all say and then, a few seconds afterwards, the question, so what’s that all about then?

It’s a new net address system which is about to replace the literally stuffed IPv4. This has run out of space for many and is, as they say, not fit for purpose. Not sure what happened to IPv5, if indeed it ever existed, but let’s hope the powers that control such things can count! There must be a reason for this!

Leading the changes is the Internet Society who are keen to bill IPv6 as a major milestone in the history of the world wide web.

The usual suspects are backing the launch, including Bing, Facebook, Google and Yahoo.

Now, with every device that connects to the internet given an individual IP address, whether it be a desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone, you can see the problem. IPv4 has room for about four billion addresses, which are fast running out, and with the growth of internet enabled devices on a massively upward trend, IPv6 is needed pretty quickly. There will soon be no room at the inn.

So, if IPv4 is pretty big at four billion, just how big is IPv6? Wait for it, it has room for no less than 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses, which might just cover the growth in Apple iPhones.

But seriously, what that means is, even if every person on the planet each had a billion iPhones, then it would hardly make a dent in the number of IPv6 allocations. Wow, so quite a lot then.

Pretty neat, although there is one inevitable downside of the switch: the new Internet Protocol is not compatible with the old, so hardware is having to be updated and replaced.

So, get ready for inevitable changes over the coming years as IPv6 begins to take over from its smaller cousin IPv4.

Are you bothered? Well, maybe we don’t have to worry too much about the changes, but you can bet that IT departments, the geeks and those who give their computer a determined slap when it fails to go online, are going to have to come to terms with some very radical changes.

And, it’s likely to cost you, it always does!

Neil Martin is a member of the digital marketing team at SEO Reading based Agency Cayenne Red. He is a regular contributor to the media on how companies market themselves in the digital age.