IPv6 is one of the buzz phrases of 2012. The new Internet protocol, which has been brewing in the industry for a long time is finally ready to make its presence felt. After a successful test on a number of sites on world IPv6 day last year, analysts insisted the technology was ready to be implemented.

Internet Protocol or IP is the method/protocol in which data is sent from one computer to another on the Internet. All computers on the Internet have at least one IP address which differentiates it from other computers. IPv6 is the natural progression of IPv4 which has been the Internet protocol of choice since the Internet became part of the public domain. It's unfortunate that v6 is rarely fully compatible with its v4 counterpart. Don't think this means the whole Internet with disappear one day and we will have to start the whole exercise again, quite the opposite! IPv6 gives the global network an almost limitless source of addresses. The availability of addresses on the Internet has come under threat due to a combination of the exponential growth of the Internet in the past decade, and IPv4's capacity for only about 4 billion addresses.

That's not all! IPv6 will allow direct connection with mobile devices whereas IPv4 requires a proxy server to retrieve packets which can then be forwarded to the mobile device. IPv6 also has many other advantages including multicasting, whereby packets can be sent to multiple destinations with one operation. A mandatory IP security process where packets are encrypted then authenticated before and after every send operation. Packets sent in IPv6 also contain locational data so their source can be tracked to a place on the globe, useful for security and social media, and also the ability to increase the size of packets by up to 64 times due to the 128 bit nature of ipv6 as oppose to the 32 bits of IPv4.

Perhaps the most exciting feature of IPv6 is the protocols ability for auto configuration. This means v6 host devices can configure themselves on the network without any human intervention. One of the aims of the protocol was to reduce the number of times the address has to be entered by network administrators. Using stateful auto configuration the client and the DHCP server must keep consistent addresses and information to ensure addresses do not conflict. With stateless auto configuration, a client can lease an address from the DHCPv6 server which the server believes will be unique as it is based on the MAC address of the client, which are unique addresses applied to every network enabled device. Due to the simplicity of the process, it becomes much more user friendly. It is a great advantage for mobile devices as they can move between networks with ease.

IPv6 is going to become the standard Internet protocol used across the whole network. This will ease fears for address capacity, increase security and most importantly allow this incredible information sharing network to continue being the ground breaking entity it has been over the past 10 years!

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