6UK

Welcome

[Note. 6UK is winding up. Read our blog post for information.]

The world needs to transition to a new Internet Protocol because the current one is running out of steam.

6UK is a not-for-profit membership organisation founded in April 2010 to help the UK and UK organisations secure every competitive advantage available from the rapid adoption of the new protocol, and otherwise to make sure no segment of UK industry and wider society gets left behind.

What’s the problem?

The Internet equivalent of a telephone number is known as an Internet Protocol address, or IP address for short. Just as you need someone’s telephone number to call him or her, network technology needs an address when instructed to dispatch a packet of data from one computer to another.

Today, the Internet mostly uses IP version 4 (IPv4) but this has now reached the limits of its capacity. IANA issued the last IPv4 address to the Regional Internet Registries (RIR) in February 2011. The RIPE NCC, the RIR covering Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia, has run out of IPV4 addresses as of September 2012.

What’s the answer?

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the next generation protocol that provides vastly expanded address space, allowing the Internet to grow to many billions of times its current size.

Every organisation must consider the implications of the need to transition to IPv6 and decide what action it needs to take. Fortunately, having been defined towards the end of the 1990s, IPv6 is a well understood and low risk protocol.

What should you do?

If you have a senior, non-technical position in your organisation, you should raise this matter with your management team, and at your next operations meeting with your technical team or provider. You can refer your colleagues to this site, and the convenient Executive Briefing on the matter.

If you have a technical role, then the same Executive Briefing will help in communicating your concerns and plan of action to non-technical colleagues. And there is also an IPv6 Project Planning Guide here for your convenience.

You may also consider alerting others to your leadership by becoming a 6UK member.

Welcome a very brief introduction to 6UK
What’s the problem? with the current Internet Protocol
What’s the answer? introducing IPv6
What should you do? for technical and non-technical people

The Internet

By anyone’s assessment, the Internet is an important infrastructure central to many innovations in business, government, media, education, healthcare, socialising, entertainment and the arts. There is hardly a part of our lives it doesn’t touch.

It’s worth noting here that whilst “Internet” and “World Wide Web” are often used interchangeably, they are not synonyms. The Web runs ‘on top’ of the Internet, as does email transmission for example.

The Internet relies on universal adoption of the Internet Protocol Suite, often referred to as TCP/IP after its two most important protocols: Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol.

Remarkably, for protocols harking back to the 1960s, they have served us incredibly well. For example, their designers had no crystal ball foretelling the arrival of the Web with its Amazons, Googles, YouTubes, Facebooks and Twitters, nor voice-over-IP or video-over-IP or BitTorrent or Internet of Things.

Yet here we are!

The versions of Internet Protocol are explained further here…

Internet Protocol version 4

Following the development of three test protocols, Internet Protocol version 4, or IPv4 for short, emerged from the labs into the real world at the beginning of the 1980s and it has been working for us faithfully ever since.

The Internet Protocol governs how packets of data are routed from one place to another on the Internet, or indeed on any network built with the protocol, and version 4 can cope with around 4.3 billion places, or addresses to use the formal term.

These unique addresses are distributed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), an entity operated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), to five Regional Internet Registries, which then distribute the addresses to their members, such as Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

The trouble is, few of these addresses remain unallocated by the five Regional Internet Registries, if any.

Internet Protocol version 6

IPv4′s successor is IPv6. (The idea of a “version 5″ was co-opted into an experimental protocol that never took off.)

For over a decade, version 6 has been waiting in the wings to take over from IPv4. It is a proven protocol powering many networks today, but whilst some evangelists would like to have seen earlier and much more widespread adoption of IPv6 than we have witnessed, ultimately the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses was always going to be the moment IPv6 would come into its own.

To be clear, the Internet does not stop working when we run out of unallocated IPv4 addresses, but its future growth is stymied without IPv6 uptake. And by association, the continued innovations the Internet makes possible in all aspects of life will be frustrated too.