Monday, 06 February 2012 07:03 Domain News
A year ago ICANN allocated the last five IPv4 address blocks to the five Regional Internet Registries in a ceremony with leaders from the Internet Architecture Board and the Internet Society. The use of the next generation of Internet addressing – IPv6 – has been steadily growing in that year and that’s a good thing, because IPv6 is how the Internet will continue to serve as a platform for innovation and economic development.IPv6 vastly increases the number of available Internet addresses. The architecture of IPv4 allowed for four billion Internet addresses. That’s no longer sufficient on a planet of 7 billion humans, where many of those humans have multiple devices attached to the Internet. Every device connected to the Internet needs an IP address, whether it is a smartphone, mail server, laptop or web server.Almost 6,700 IPv6 networks were publicly routed on the Internet in January 2012, and more are expected in the months leading up to World IPv6 Launch on 6 June 2012. On that day, Internet service providers, web companies and home networking equipment manufacturers around the world are asked to permanently enable IPv6.
This announcement was sourced from ICANN.org .
