Maputo — A new system for assigning internet addresses will provide entrepreneurs with opportunities for innovation. This is the view of Jordi Palet Martinez, an internet consultant who made a presentation on the new IPv6 system to the AfriNIC policy making meeting in Maputo, Mozambique .

Martinez says that the Internet Protocol version six (IPv6) should be actively promoted and implemented to take the place of IPv4 because the existing system does not have the capacity to cope with the increasing demand for IP addresses.

The current IPv4 system was set up in 1978 and had the capacity to generate over four billion IP addresses, a number that at the time seemed far more than would ever be required. Since there were only four hundred odd machines attached to the network, it was reasonable to expect that it would never run out of addresses.

Today there are more than 400 million computers linked to the internet and the demand for new addresses is growing daily as devices such as cell phones, PDAs and even washing-machines require IP numbers. Estimates about when the IPv4 system is going to run out of addresses vary from as soon as 2012 to as late as 2029 – but all agree that time is running out.

IPv6 with 128 bit addresses will have a far greater scalability than the 32 bits of the IPv4 system . The IPv6 internet portal, aimed at promoting the new system, calculates that the new version will have capacity for 340 282 366 920 938 463 463 374 607 431 768 211 456 IP addresses. To illustrate how enormous this number really is, the portal site says that there will be 665 570 793 348 866 943 898 599 addresses for every square metre of land on earth.

Martinez impressed even long-time internet experts with a 'live' demonstration of the capacity of IPv6. He linked his laptop computer to a data projector to show four web cam views of his house in Madrid Spain . He said that while the web cams have the ability to show live streaming, the bandwidth capacity of the conference centre forced him to scale back the refresh rate to once every ten or fifteen seconds.

One of the cams showed a closed curtain while another offered a translucent view out of a window onto his porch. Martinez pressed a few buttons and the refreshed pictures showed that not only had the two curtains opened, but that his dogs outside had reacted to the movements from within the house.

He described the demonstration as a simple example of what IPv6 can really do.

While urging the members of the recently recognized AfriNIC to adopt IPv6 as soon as possible, he acknowledged that the transition process could take a long time and experience some compatibility problems. The most serious difficulties would arise as a result of older operating systems such as Windows 95 and 98 not being able to resolve the version six addresses.

When the internet changed to a new protocol in 1983, the process took a little over a month and caused the demise of a few old host systems. It is believed that a similar transformation of the internet from version four to version six would take years.

Incidentally, IPv5 was a name assigned to an experiment in streaming. This experiment was abandoned and so was its name.