Over 200 countries are impacted by the Internet, and are looking to make the Internet work to help their people. Many interactions between the United Nations and ICANN, the organization that coordinates top-level domain names, have been made to discuss the future of the Internet and how it can be used to improve the quality of life for the world’s population.

IPv6 stands for Internet Protocol Version 6. The current Internet, based on TCP/IP, has been in use in more or less its current form as IPv4 since January 1983. IPv4 uses a 32-bit address, enabling only 4 billion addresses. With increasing demand for IP addresses the supply of new existing addresses becomes smaller and smaller with each passing day. As time goes on cell phones and PDA devices are becoming increasingly sophisticated and Internet enabled, which will create even greater demand for IP addresses. What if we wanted to give every cell phone it's own IP address, so that you would be able to order movie tickets from Fandango, or book a flight to Barbados for the weekend while standing in line at the grocery store? Not enough addresses. What if you wanted to give each car an IP address so that your mechanic will automatically know when it is time for you to schedule an oil change, or if you wanted to learn the current traffic pattern between Dulles International Airport and Leesburg, VA while driving down Interstate 70? There are 56 million new vehicles made each year, and almost 800 million on the road today. Not enough IPv4 addresses for this either. The list continues with dozens of product categories; Boeing estimates that the average home in the US has over 250 different devices that could benefit from being connected to the Internet. Multiply this by 500 million households, and you can see there is a great demand for the current supply of remaining addresses.

The introduction of IPv6 can help remove this potential gridlock on the global information superhighway. IPv6 addresses are 128-bit addresses, enabling 3.8 x 10 to the 38th power, or trillions of trillions of trillions of IP addresses...enough for every grain of sand on earth. IPv6 has a very proven level of reliability and technical usability.

IPv6 has other advantages: restoring the end to end and peer to peer communications model for the Internet, more flexible packet headers, Jumbograms (so that a packet payload can be up to 4 GB vs. 64 KB – making downloading a MP3 of the new Enya song as quick and easy as screwing in a new light bulb), stateless address auto-configuration and node discovery optimizations to support mobility, and a mandatory requirement for IP layer security using IPsec. These benefits improve the quality and utility of the Internet, in addition to making the Internet potentially available to every person, place and thing as we evolve the Internet to support next generation networking and a mobile society.

A lot of this information can be summerized by these facts: Today's Internet is comprised of approximately 1 billion uers. Those 1 billion users represent just 15% of the world's population. 85% of the world has yet to access and use the Internet on a daily basis, and the 1 billion users are consuming approximately 97% of the Internet's physical capacity. In the future we will have an Internet network comprised of trillions of users, and less than a tiny fraction of those users will be people, the remaining users will be sensors, cameras, devices, motors, biometrics and all sorts of other objects. We will move from a world of a person to person Internet networked world, to one of being a machine to machine Internet networked world. To get there we truly need the Internet to be an information super highway, not a two lane dirt road out in the country.