The underlying technology powering the Internet is going through a major overhaul as IPv6 is slowly replacing the aging IPv4, the most widely used networking protocol. The adoption rate has been slow but more and more companies are implementing the new protocol. Google is already one of the biggest adopters and is now working on introducing support to its hugely popular video site YouTube.

Implementing the new protocol isn't a big technical hurdle, Google says, but YouTube is one of the biggest and most heavily trafficked websites, so the company isn't setting any hard deadlines for the moment. "YouTube is the IPv6 team's number one priority right now," Erik Kline, IPv6 software engineer at Google, told NetworkWorld. "We haven't said anything about the timeframe for that yet."

Google's IPv6 team has already implemented the protocol for many of the company's online proprieties like its search engine, Alerts, Docs, Finance, Gmail, Health, iGoogle, News, Reader, Picasa, Maps and Wave. However, it's still pretty much a provisionary measure for now as few people access the sites through IPv6 at the moment largely due to the fact that the feature has been implemented by only a small number of ISPs.

"It's somewhere on the order of the 0.2% range of Google users have IPv6 access," Lorenzo Colitti, network engineer at Google, says. "Around 40% of that traffic is native. We've seen healthy growth in the last year." Google anticipates further growth down the line as more companies start offering support, both in devices and software but also at the ISP level.

IPv6 offers several advantages over IPv4 but the biggest reason why companies are starting to support it is because it offers a much larger number of possible IP addresses. This has become an issue lately as the number of IPv4 addresses available is running out while demand for them is going strong. Implementing IPv6 at a global level will solve the problem but for now most companies are delaying the switch.