Companies gear up for IPv6 launch

Websites, ISPs and networking equipment manufacturers are teaming up to enable IPv6 for their products and services.

The permanent move, will occur on 6 June and forms part of World IPv6 Launch Day, which has been organised by the Internet Society.

Last year’s World IPv6 Day sought to raise awareness of declining stocks of IPv4 addresses and encourage more organisations to prepare their services for the introduction of IPv6 addresses.

Ben Pirt, VP of Engineering at Cosm (formerly known as Pachube) – an IPv6-ready, web-based service that connects people, devices and the Internet of Things, who is supporting the launch, said: “Moving to IPv6 will unleash countless new possibilities in how we can use the internet.

“Whereas IPv4 limited us to just four billion unique IP addresses, IPv6 provides a large enough address space to open the door for every object to start ‘talking to each other’ and sharing data in real-time.”

He added that the industry was already starting to see devices as diverse as weighing scales, lighting and toasters connect to the Internet of Things and in the near future we were going to see much more sophisticated uses for these connected objects and sensors.

“With IPv6, things are about to get very interesting indeed,” he added.