The available IP addresses using IPv4 or IP version 4 is set to exhaust before the targeted three years and thus the doomsday of Internet has been widely speculated. This has brought many companies to panic as it will be nothing less than a crisis. Though the improved protocol version IP6 is available it has not been unreluctantly adopted. IP addresses allow individual devices, including computers, Notebooks, and mobile handsets to connect to the Internet.

Using the IPv4 system, which offers a total of about 4.7 billion possible IP addresses, some countries, such as India and China will begin to run out of addresses they can allocate around 2010, according to estimates by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

But IPv6 will enable the number of possible addresses increases by billions and thus allowing a far greater number of devices to connect, allowing additional features like the Internet-based remote control of security cameras, and even turning on home appliances from one's desktop at work. Thus IPv 6 is a reality which many technology managers are not recognizing. This means that the move to IP6 will be sudden and not well controlled.

One barrier to early IPv6 adoption is that intermediate measures, such as NAT, have been very effective. IPv6 deployments are being deferred due to short-term business pressures. However, NAT is not along term measure, as servers cannot be connected using it.

China is already one of the world's largest IPv6 networks, only a fraction of that capacity is used, and only for academic and research institutes. These facts were highlighted at the recent Beijing conference on internet.

Soniya Nautiyal