June 6 marked the beginning of the new
internet. The good news it that it happened with little fanfare and
almost no one noticed.
The old Internet is almost out of room. The new Internet is vastly
bigger. It's ready for trillions and trillions more computers,
devices, web sites, etc.
In order to be on the Internet, a device or Web site needs an
address. The old Internet had about 4.3 billion IP (Internet
protocol) addresses. The original inventors never thought they would
run out of numbers, but today, there are more mobile phones in use
than that. The new Internet allows for about 40 trillion trillion
trillion (or, 340,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000)
addresses.
This new Internet is known as Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) and
the old Internet is IPv4. (IPv5 was scrapped).
Here's an example of what an old Internet address looked like:
192.0.2.1. Here is an example of a new IPv6 address: 2001:0db8:
85a3:0000:0000: 8a2e:0370:7334.
Network engineers have been working on this for years and you
shouldn't notice anything different as they completely switch
everything from the old Internet to the new Internet, which will
take a couple of years.
If you are going to sign up for a new ISP (service provider) or buy
a new home router or launch a new Web-based business, make sure it
works with IPv6. Even though the new Internet is totally turned on,
not every network provider has become IPv6 compliant. Many
businesses have been spending millions of dollars and years to
upgrade their networks.
Over time, the new Internet will have all kinds of devices (things
we can't even imagine) connected to the Internet, like every
appliance in your home, medical sensors, and much more.