Wired:One of the most recurrent phrases in tech culture is that "next year will be the year of the X", where X is always the same, but the next year is continuously changing, writes Danny O'Brien.
Next year has been the year of the Linux desktop since around 2000, with still no indication that Linux will be anything more than a fraction of a single percent of desktops in any year. We went through a decade of next year being the year of the network, before it actually was the year of the network.
Among net techies themselves, perhaps the longest prelude of all has been the wait for IPv6. Next year will be the year of IPv6, we've been saying since 1996. And there's usually a good reason: because if it's not, the internet will surely collapse.
As you may have noticed, the internet hasn't collapsed - or it's collapsing no more than usual. So what has happened to those technical predictions? And what in the world is IPv6?
IPv6 is the long-planned overhaul of the very basic structure of the modern internet. The all-wise founding fathers (and mothers) of the internet realised in the early 1990s that, if it was going to continue expanding at its then exponential rate, some early hard-wired limitations of its design would be hit very soon. In particular, the net has only a limited number of "IP addresses" - numbers that are used to identify unique internet computers.
In theory, you can have 4,294,967,296 reachable machines on our current, IP Version 4 (IPv4) internet. In practice, the number is smaller, partly because some of the earlier organisations online reserved an excessive number for their own use. Apple, MIT and Halliburton each have 16 million IP addresses each (the same as Africa or Japan) for instance, and won't hand them back. It's also tricky to divide up the remaining IP numbers in convenient ways. And some large chunks were allotted for specific uses, and can't be recycled.
Whatever the reasons, it is clear that we're going to run out of IP numbers at some point, unless something is done. The original plan was IPv6, a revamped protocol, that provides an insanely high number of IP addresses - in theory, millions for each person.
But IPv6 requires a lot of "converting to metric"-type shifting by those running the internet infrastructure. For you to be able to reach the IPv6 internet, every part of the net from your PC to your service provider's routing equipment, to the exchanges that pass data from your ISP to another, to the server that you're attempting to reach, will need to be IPv6-friendly.
A few of these pieces are in place. If you're running Windows XP or Vista, a Mac or Linux, your kit is quietly prepared for IPv6. Your ISP is far less likely to have thought about the switch, because it's far too much of a headache to even consider. But consider it they will, say the doomsayers, because sometime in September 2010, the supply of IPv4 numbers will dry up.
And what will happen then? Well, it's a bit like the moment of "peak oil" that many ecologists speak about. There won't be a sudden collapse. At that point, IP numbers will become scarce, and their cost will rise. Since ISPs are the only people in the game of bulk-buying IP numbers, though, one would expect that they will balk at paying high costs for Apple's second-hand IPs, and start investing in (the now relatively cheaper) IPv6 roll-out instead.
There's another possibility, though, and one which has already had a deleterious effect on the nature of the net. ISPs could start rationing IP numbers to their end users. They already do this, in fact - if you have more than one computer at home, the chances are they're all living off one IP address.
It's called "network address translation" (NAT), and what it means is that to the rest of the world, your home network just looks like one somewhat schizophrenic computer.
The upside for many net users, including businesses, is that no external computers can directly connect to your PCs behind the NAT. It's like being ex-directory: without a number, no one can get to you.
But that's a massive downside to the design of the net. Computers on the net are supposed to be reachable by each other. You should be able to access your net-enabled fridge, or check the mail on your home machine from your office.
Your phone should be able to serve web pages or use Skype or report its position to your friend's phone, without ISPs or phone companies messing around with fake IP addresses in the middle.
Ironically, it may be this need to connect that drives IPv6 adoption faster than the ISP's need to find new IP addresses. Even if connected to a non-IPv6 friendly ISP, Vista and XP can create a fake IPv6 number via Microsoft. Apple's Airport Extreme Wi-Fi routers can give a similar ersatz IPv6 number to every machine that they connect to your network.
The idea behind both is to give PCs and Macs the access they need to the wider net, that living behind traditional NATs can't get them. Perhaps it'll be a craving to connect rather than the profits of ISPs, that will really herald the year of the new net.
