On October 29th, the Internet will turn 40 years old. Marking this occasion, IEEE has held an international event in Los Angeles, USA to mark its own 125th anniversary and the upcoming birthday of the former ARPAnet project, currently referred to as the Internet. At this event many renowned scientists and Internet experts spoke on today's main Internet-related topics.

One of those invited at this special event was Vinton Cerf, worldwide famous scientist who practically built the Internet with his hands. The co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol suite, ARPAnet lead scientist and ICANN founder, Mr. Cerf has been recently involved with the Internet Engineering Task Force on the IPv6 protocol and with Google as Vice President and Internet Evangelist.

Mr. Cerf pointed out that, due to its fast growing rhythm, the Internet will surely use all of the available IPv4 addresses until the end of the 2010-2011. He again publicly lobbied for major ISPs around the Globe and to the IEEE board of directors to officially start implementing and migrating all IPv4 addresses to the new protocol.

He also predicted that the Internet would for sure expand its reach to all corners of the human activity, and even in out-of-space. Mr. Cerf has been recently working with a group of scientists to connect equipment from two different out-of-space locations with Earth using the Internet as the main transportation medium. The project was successful in connecting a location on Earth with the EPOXI space shuttle and the International Space Station.

Known to the new generation as an Internet Evangelist at Google more than a scientist, Mr. Cerf has been on a public campaign to convince the world to move to the IPv6 standard. This move, if followed through as it should normally be, will bring huge profits to companies like Cisco that have been developing IPv6 compatible machines for this moment.

Also at the meeting was Howard Charney, senior vice-president in the office of the president at Cisco, who said, ”What comes next is pervasive computing, where everything is connected, 24/7, to everything else.” For this industry prediction to come true, Mr. Cerf's recommendation needs to be followed as soon as possible. And for sure there won't be anybody at Cisco complaining about that.