The adoption of IPv6

There is no question the Internet has revolutionalized the world. Many of the things we take for granted today were not even possible a few years ago. Will the Internet continue to push the boundaries of technology? The answer lies within IPv6. IPv6 will replace IPv4 as the standard addressing scheme of the Internet. Why do we need a new addressing scheme? There are numerous amounts of limitations in IPv4, namely, the shortage of addresses. Most countries, excluding the United States, do not have nearly as many IP addresses as they need. The United States owns 70% of the available IP addresses, so it is no surprise that the United States is not pushing for a quick transition to the new technology.This is all new material for professional technologists. The first implementation was IPv4, which built the addressing scheme, but now IPv6 is the first step to revise and expand it. This will take extraneous time and perseverance to complete the Internet Protocol next generation. The European Union and Japan are leading the transition to IPv6. This is inevitable since they rely on the Internet as much as the Americans, yet own significantly fewer IP addresses. IT professionals question the theory of which to upgrade first the Domain Name Server (DNS), routers, or hosts. There is not an IPv6 DNS root server. Presently, the DNS implementations all run on top of IPv4 addresses and the DNS system that supports IPv6 is linked to IPv4 information. Some DNS implementations are beginning to support national IPv6 transitions, such as, bind8 with a KAME patch, or newbie and bind9 (which are still under development). Upgrading these servers is a crucial step in the conversion process. Asia is in the process of implementing 6Bone, a virtual network layer that allows IPv4 and IPv6 to coexist. This is a major requirement for a smooth transition to IPv6. Without an intermediate layer like 6Bone, the only alternative would be to change every network in the world over to IPv6 on a specified day at a specific time-not a very ideal situation. Japan's 6Bone will take 4-5 years to complete, not including additional time to debug and fix errors.