Internet protocol needs to change

With the Internet only a few short years away from running out of addresses, Taiwan urgently needs to upgrade to a new technology, the head of the Directorate General of Telecommunications under the Ministry of Transportation and Communications said yesterday.

"We need to upgrade to Internet Protocol version 6 [IPv6], as under the current technology we will run out of Internet addresses within two to three years," DGT Director General, Chien Jen-ter (簡仁德), said yesterday.

He was speaking at the eighth Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT) in Taipei.

Computers use IP addresses to communicate with each other on the Internet.

The Internet began in 1969 as a network of US military computers that could communicate directly with each other over telephone lines. It was later expanded to include universities, businesses and individuals.

The current technology, IP version 4 (IPv4), uses a string of 12 numbers for each IP address, limiting Internet adresses to 1 trillion.

Twenty years ago when IPv4 was introduced, it was estimated that a trillion addresses would be more than enough to connect the world.

But, with the invention of the World Wide Web -- a service within the Internet that allows users to access pages of information -- by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1991, IP addresses were required not only for each individual computer, but also for each new Web site.

Six million new addresses are used up across the world each day, Chien said. Upgrading to IPv6 is the solution for expanding shortage.

"IPv6 will dramatically increase the number of available addresses," said Dan Weber, IT manager for logistics specialists the Rehfeldt Group in Taipei.

An Internet engineer agreed with Chien's assessment, but warned of problems during the transition period.

"There is a shortage of IP addresses and time is running out," said Yang Shih-ching (楊士青), an Internet engineer at Web consultants Pristine Communications in Taipei. "There is a problem that IPv6 is not compatible with IPv4, so a large part of the network will not be able to connect to a new IPv6 Internet."

Tammy Turner, a partner at Pristine Communications, said that there's still a big pool of numbers.

"So many addresses went down after the dotcom bubble," Turner said.

Companies and Internet service providers will need to make the software upgrade, affecting a large number of local users.

At the end of last year the number of Internet users in Taiwan topped 8.5 million, according to the government-funded Market Intelligence Center. That means 38 percent of the population is online, with over 2 million using broadband services alone.

This year the world will pass the 700-million-Internet-user mark, International Data Corp reported.