European Commissioner Erkki Liikanen is trying to persuade governments and industry to work together to fast-track the adoption of version six of the Internet Protocol, and shift the web away from the 20 year-old IPv4.

The European Union's IPv6 push is noteworthy because it shows the extent to which politicians have begun to drive technological adoption for economic purposes.

The world is running out of 32-bit internet addresses, which are used by IPv4. The need for more addresses is growing with the increasing number of mobile internet devices, and will increase further with forthcoming web-enabled cars, fridges, toasters, ashtrays and whatever else.

Fortunately, IPv6 will cope with many more devices because it uses 128-bit addresses. This means that every electronic item for many years to come will be able to have its own internet address.

Famous five

So what's the big deal, why should you care, and whatever happened to IP version five?

I'll start with the last thing first: IPv5 never really existed. It was assigned to identify ST, an experimental non-IP, real-time stream protocol, which was never widely adopted. IPv6 is the next step on from IPv5.

The reason you should care about IPv6 is because it can save a lot of time for staff who otherwise would manually type IP numbers such as 193.365.22.435 into endless dialog boxes on workstations.

Very few firms automate the allocation of IP addresses, with over half the IP networks manually defining them and keying them in.

IPv6 automates a lot of this process, which will also help to reduce conflicts when IP addresses are arbitrarily assigned, as many are. It uses hexadecimal addressing, and can elide sets of zeros, shortening the addresses significantly. It can also pack more information into the header of an address, but keeps it small.

Smooth move

The transition to the new protocol will not be a difficult one, according to the experts. IPv6 will talk to IPv4 networks, and vice versa, with IPv6 packets tunnelling through the IPv4 connection.

The newer protocol is also designed to help a host device automatically configure itself, discover the information it needs to connect to the web and send out information about itself.

Beyond this, IPv6 will tag various types of data in order to avoid congestion. For example, email will have a different priority to some types of streaming information, or Telnet session data.

Six appeal

There is a race on for the internet regulators to persuade businesses to move to IPv6 before the supply of IPv4 addresses runs out. No doubt there will be some teething problems with the new protocol, and IT managers will take a cautious approach.

But IPv6 has been in development since 1991, under what was called the Internet Activities Board. The protocol proposals were finalised in 1995, and have undergone several years of testing.

The European Union's move has come at the right time, as IPv6 will bring benefits to businesses and consumers alike.