The New Internet will provide profound benefits to the public, industry, and governments, according to senior political and military leaders, IT executives, and first responders of crises, at a summit in Hyatt Regency in Reston, Virginia on May 17-19.
The New Internet is expected to revolutionize technologies used in major areas:
- Crisis management and first-responder communications during disasters like Hurricane Katrina and 9/11.
- Border security, tamper-proof ID, and Biometrics which can impact immigration reform issues.
- Future oil exploration and conservation with "Sensornets".
A panel of crisis response experts discussed "how the New Internet can enable first responders – law enforcement agencies, firefighters, federal agents, National Guard units – to finally all communicate with each other, something they were unable to do during 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina," according the summit press release.
Massive Transition to the New Internet
"The New Internet" is called Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). The summit in Reston, Virginia, this month was a Federal IPv6 Summit . (http://www.federalipv6summit.com)
Many people are now familiar with Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), where phone conversations can be conducted over the Internet. VoIP is only a small part of the expanding use of the Internet. Video, music, and other data communications are also conducted over the Internet. The convergence of almost every type of communications over the Internet is giving rise to another hot term called Everything over IP (EoIP).
The current Internet is based on a much older technology, Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), which has been in use since 1973. The older Internet was not designed for the explosive growth varied usage, and unpredictability that we are experiencing. Over the years, advances were made to IPv4 to keep up with increasing demands. However, those advances are limited and lead to substantial complications.
IPv6 is the most significant upgrade of the Internet. It is expected to improve major limitations of the current Internet with vastly greater address space, greater simplicity, improved performance, security, mobility, and auto-configuration.
The transition from IPv4 to IPv6 will be an enormous undertaking. During years of transition, both IPv4 and IPv6 will need to be supported by routers, switches, firewalls, servers, and workstations. Hardware and software that utilizes the network will need to be transitioned.
The growth of the old Internet is expected to peak in 2010 and the New Internet, based on IPv6, will eventually dominate the Internet, predicts Alex Lightman, CEO and Chairman of IPv6 Summit, Inc.
IPv6 is already widely available in Japan, Korea, and Europe, ahead of the U.S.
Harrisonburg, Virginia will become the first "City of the Future" in America with a native IPv6 commercial wireless network.
The U.S. federal government, which is known to be the largest buyer of IT related products and services in the world, has mandated the adoption of the New Internet by 2008. Over $28 billion in IT procurements was awarded in the first quarter of 2006, according to the summit press release.
Explosive Impact of Windows Vista
Next year, the public release of Microsoft's Windows Vista will cause usage of IPv6 to explode by a thousand fold, predicts Alex Lightman.
"With Windows Vista, IPv6 support is installed by default and built-in Windows Vista network services and applications are now IPv6-capable. This new level of IPv6 support in Windows Vista has the potential of igniting the networking industry with new applications and connectivity in the same way as the inclusion of a TCP/IP stack in Windows 95 ignited the industry for the applications and services of the Internet," according to Joseph Davies, technical writer at Microsoft.
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