The Internet gets bigger

July 2004

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced at its bi-annual five-day meeting in Kuala Lumpar that Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) has been added to the Internet's Domain Name Servers (DNS) root server system. ICANN will now be able to allocate IP addresses and domain names using this latest version of the Internet. The current version is IPv4.

IPv6 is a change to the basic Internet infrastructure that will allow millions more devices to attach to it. The popularity of the wireless Internet and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has put increasing pressure on the IPv4-based Internet in recent months and the introduction of IPv6 is essential to enable the Net and related technologies to grow.

IPv6 will allow for 340 sextillion (36 zeros) Internet addresses as opposed to IPv4, which only allows for 4 billion addresses. The newer protocol also boasts a 128-bit addressing system as compared to IPv4's 32-bit system.