The Impact of IPv6 on the Internet

[David Baxter PhD]

The Impact of IPv6
by Tara Meehan
2010-06-07

It turns out the infinite online space is anything but; the Internet is going through something of a cyber jam. By September 2011, the final extensive batches of addresses will be distributed. Yes, final. A few months later, there will be no new addresses available. I can sense the creation of www.2000glitchredux.com rapidly approaching. But in all seriousness, the ramifications of IPv6 could ultimately prove devastating – to some.

While the major search engine and online presences are ready for the switch, small businesses in particular are wary of the new technology from financial and systemic standpoints. But they aren’t the only ones feeling the heat. Content providers also need to get with the IPv6 program. And did I mention performance marketers?

IPv6’s impact on a full-service digital marketing suite of products and services may be hard to quantify but it is necessary to understand. Now is the time for digital agencies to leverage the power of IPv6 and implement it into their marketing strategy. Developing expert knowledge relevant to the coming internet protocol will foster trust with customers, essential for improving optimization, increasing consumer profitability and driving results.

 

[David Baxter PhD]

IPv6 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is a version of the Internet Protocol that is designed to succeed IPv4, the first publically used implementation, which is still in dominant use currently[update]. It is an Internet Layer protocol for packet-switched internetworks. The main driving force for the redesign of Internet Protocol is the foreseeable IPv4 address exhaustion. IPv6 is specified by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and described in Internet standard document RFC 2460, which was published in December 1998.[1]

IPv6 has a vastly larger address space than IPv4. This results from the use of a 128-bit address, whereas IPv4 uses only 32 bits. The new address space thus supports 2128 (about 3.4?1038) addresses. This expansion provides flexibility in allocating addresses and routing traffic and eliminates the primary need for network address translation (NAT), which gained widespread deployment as an effort to alleviate IPv4 address exhaustion.

IPv6 also implements new features that simplify aspects of address assignment (stateless address autoconfiguration) and network renumbering (prefix and router announcements) when changing Internet connectivity providers. The IPv6 subnet size has been standardized by fixing the size of the host identifier portion of an address to 64 bits to facilitate an automatic mechanism for forming the host identifier from Link Layer media addressing information (MAC address).

Network security is integrated into the design of the IPv6 architecture. Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) was originally developed for IPv6, but found widespread optional deployment first in IPv4 (into which it was back-engineered). The IPv6 specifications mandate IPsec implementation as a fundamental interoperability requirement.

In December 2008, despite marking its 10th anniversary as a Standards Track protocol, IPv6 was only in its infancy in terms of general worldwide deployment. A 2008 study[2] by Google Inc. indicated that penetration was still less than one percent of Internet-enabled hosts in any country. IPv6 has been implemented on all major operating systems in use in commercial, business, and home consumer environments.[3]

Read more at IPv6 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia