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Google Is Prepared for the Future

IPv6 users can access the Google search webpage

By Traian Teglet, Technology News Editor

14th of May 2008, 08:12 GMT

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The Google search webpage is now available for IPv6 users

As of April this year, estimations are that the current number of available IPs are not going to be sufficient for all of the Earth's inhabitants. The current IPv4 Internet standard can provide networks with "only" 4 billion IP

configurations, which isn't enough to cover all the 6 billion possible Internet users. It is said that sometime between 2010 and 2011, IPv4 is going to reach its limits, leaving every other user with no possibility of connecting to the Internet.

IPv4 is today's dominant network layer protocol, which is used for packed switched network (otherwise known as the Ethernet). This standard has been designed to use 32-bit network addresses and has a dot-decimal notation composed of four groups, each having a maxim of 3 digits and a minimum of 1 digit. Because of its technical specifications, IPv4 is limited to offering only 4 billion IP addresses, a part of which are reserved for special purposes. The future-to-be network protocol, IPv6, has the technical capacity of extending the number of available IP addresses, as it is built on 128-bit network addresses.

Technologies such as Network Address Translation (NAT) can offer a temporary solution, but ultimately they end up complicating the Internet's architecture, which is clearly not the way of the future. This is the reason why Google has recently announced that its search engine webpage is now available to IPv6 users. The ipv6.google.com address can be accessed by any IPv6 user, which also has an operating system offering support for the IPv6 internet protocol. The availability of this link is just another way in which Google confirms its continuous interest in the future of the Internet.

At the moment, Windows Vista, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems are providing high-quality support for IPv6, which is expected to become the Internet protocol standard as soon as possible.

TAGS:

google | internet | protocol | ip | networking

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