One of the major challenges for the next generation of the Internet is whether the Internet is capable to connect billions of people and devices worldwide. The key part of the technology which makes this huge feat possible is the Internet Protocol (IP). IP is defined by Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development as an addressing system which specifies the communication that take place between one device and another. OECD is one of many organisations which help encourage the deployment of IPv6. Meanwhile, Procurve Networking defined IP as the foundation of the TCP/IP communication procedures used to convey data, voice and video packets over the Internet.
Currently, the IP version in use is IP version 4 (IPv4), and every device must have an IP address in order to communicate. However, IPv4 addresses are nearing full usage, where only 8% of addresses remaining in March 2010 and it is expected to run out in 2012. This rapid growth of the Internet has already been addressed since 1991 and the solution for this insufficiency of internet addresses is creating a new, improved version of IP which will also address almost all of the problem faced when using IPv4, which is IP version 6 (IPv6).
During the early development phase, IPv6 was referred to as IP Next Generation or IPng. A team of engineers and scientists under the Internet Engineering Steering Group, or also known as Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) were appointed to define the next generation internet protocol in 1991.
The first documentation which documented the IPv6 standard is Request for Comments (RFC) number 1183 which wrote about the IPv6 base protocol. Other RFCs which covered the details of IPv6 is RFC 1884, RFC 1885, RFC 1886 and RFC 1933. These are the documents made during the early days of IPv6 development.
OECD starts to work on encouraging the deployment of IPv6 by doing conferences in 2008. However, IPv6 is still in its early age, where only 1.45% of the top 1000 websites and just 0.15% of the top one million websites in the world had an IPv6 website in early 2010. Operating systems has also been developed to support IPv6. From a study in January 2010, over 90% of the installed base of operating system is IPv6 ready, but often it requires extra configuration, mainly Windows XP which makes up 67.81% of the number of operating system being used. However this study was made before the new version of Windows, Windows 7 was manufactured. Windows 7 support IPv6 by default and no configurations need to be made. Therefore, all type of operating systems should be able to support IPv6 by default now.
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