| Threads of a wider web
Wednesday March 24th, 2004
Financial Times
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For most people, the internet means web pages. It means sites with text and pictures, animation and music. It means content. But as the internet has grown up, it has become more than the information superhighway. The universally accepted protocols of internet communication have made a worldwide digital communications network to transcend all others. Rather than just let us look at web pages, the internet is letting us communicate - and letting machines communicate without us.
"It's the extended internet. It's the next generation of the internet, which will mean the extension of internet communications to all electronic devices," says Stan Schatt, vice-president of Forrester Research in the US. The idea of devices talking to one another over the internet has been with us for some time. Fridges that detect when your food stock is low and send an order to the supermarket over the internet were confidently predicted during the internet boom.
Such internet fridges, or at least approximations of them, have indeed become available. Not many people have them. It turns out to be more difficult to get machines talking to one another than some had thought. Yet the technology to allow such communication exists. If devices could talk to one another over the internet, we could have a world of smart houses and smart offices.
For instance, the global positioning capability on your mobile phone could alert your house to your imminent arrival, allowing it to turn up the heating and get the kettle on. Household appliances like washing machines and vacuum cleaners could inform their manufacturers if they required repair. Sensors attached to light bulbs could turn them on and off as people approached and track their movements around buildings.
Each of these devices could communicate wirelessly, probably using technology known as wireless LAN, or 802.11. A central server in the home running internet protocols would form the gateway between the home systems and the outside world.
In order to achieve such a degree of connectedness, every device would have to be able to be located on the internet. This effectively requires each device to have an internet "address". These addresses are strings of numbers that allow internet protocols to locate and communicate with any entity on the network. Every internet address you type into a web browser (eg, www.ft.com) is translated through the browser into a string of numbers, without the user seeing it.
The problem is that we are running out of these addresses. Current internet technology should, in theory, provide 4bn unique addresses. However, thanks to the way in which these have been used and parcelled out, the actual number of addresses available is reckoned to be much less. For instance, as the internet was in effect governed by the US, North American companies were allocated many more addresses than others. Some countries, as a result, have all but run out of internet addresses, Japan and China in particular.
These problems have been partly solved by a system of technological patches that allow areas suffering a shortage to make the most of their addresses.
However, this electronic sticking plaster will not allow for the expansion of the internet into the realm of machine-to-machine communication between devices that smart homes and offices will require. Fortunately, new internet technology was developed several years ago that solves such issues properly. This new technology, Internet Protocol Version 6, provides a virtually unlimited set of internet addresses.
IPv6 also allows for much greater security, mobility and a higher quality of service than current internet technology, known as IPv4.
It should also be easier to use, adds John King, IPv6 consultant at BT Exact: "IPv6 is plug and play. You should be able to turn on a device and it will find its own address on the network, and start working. The user shouldn't have to do any configuration or anything techie."
Adding IPv6 to chips in electronic devices would also be technologically easy. "The cost would be negligible," says Mr Schatt.
If the advantages are so obvious, why aren't we using IPv6? "It's not really a technology issue. It's about the mindset. People like what they know, which is IPv4, and their mindset is not to spend money," explains Mr King.
Unfortunately, IPv4 and IPv6 are not compatible. For both to run together on the internet, data using IPv4 must be "wrapped" inside technology that makes it look like IPv6, and vice versa. This is a technically unsatisfactory "fudge", and these wrappers add to the complexity and cost of sending data.
Mr King advises companies to start planning for IPv6 now to minimise the cost. Networking hardware must be replaced as it reaches the end of its useful life, so companies should systematically replace it with IPv6 technology. This will allow IPv6 to be quietly assumed into networks around the world, leading to a gradual changeover.
For a truly connected world, cellphones would certainly have to be equipped with IPv6. For this, phones have to be redesigned, but without too much difficulty, says Thomas Mendel, principal analyst at Forrester Research in Germany, noting that phone manufacturers have such capabilities in trial but not production models.
Partly, this is because mobile network operators have not been keen to include such internet technology in phones, seeing a threat to their business if phone users can conduct conversations using the Voice over Internet Protocol technology that rivals current voice communication technology. "The question is who carries more weight, carriers or customers? I would argue that in the end it will be the customers," says Mr Mendel.
Help for IPv6 is coming from an unexpected quarter. In the US, the Department of Defense has decided that it wants its suppliers to start using IPv6, with a view to conducting all of its internet communications using the new protocol by 2008. These plans were prompted by the increased security that IPv6 offers. For similar reasons, the US Commerce Department has created a task force to examine the case for IPv6 and how the US government can aid deployment.
Even with such important backing, widespread commercial changeover to IPv6 looks as much as a decade away in the US. Countries experiencing shortages of addresses have more incentive to change.
"Japan and China will certainly lead in this market, they're going to have (widespread usage) in two to three years," predicts Mr Mendel. Smart homes and offices will follow a few years later. It would be ironic if the US, which gave the world the internet, should fall behind in the technology's next generation.
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