Griffith College Leads The Way

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Griffith College Dublin is the first Irish third level college in Ireland to fully deploy IPv6. We are also members of the Irish IPv6 task Force, and were the 50thIrish website of any sort to receive a platinum IPv6 certification. All of this is part of Griffith College’s commitment to delivering to the highest standards for our staff and students. This development is very important for the future of internet delivery in the College, but what does it mean?

Most people have heard of the idea of an IP Address. This is like your computer's phone number on the internet. It is the unique number that people can use to send information to your computer. When you ask for www.gcd.ie, information from our website is sent from our server to your IP address. Without a valid IP address you cannot communicate across the world wide web. IPv4 is the current world wide standard for IP addresses and the problem is that the number of addresses it can handle is running out Fast.

About twenty years ago, the Dublin phone system used six digit numbers, meaning you could only ever have one million phone numbers. In the late ...
... eighties it was realised that one million phone numbers would not be enough for the greater Dublin area, so over a period of about a year Telecom Eireann added a digit to everyone's phone number so that all phone numbers had seven digits. This raised the limit to about 10 million landline phones, where it still stands today.

As with phone numbers, IP addresses have a certain number of digits. This means that there are a limited number of them. This limit applies across the whole world. In IPv4, the current standard, there can be approximately four billion addresses. That sounds like a huge number, but if you think about it, that's far less addresses than people in the world and lots of people have several computers these days (work pc, home laptop, ipad, smart phone, ...).

The global supply of IP addresses available using IPv4 ran out in January 2011. The Asia-Pacific region has since exhausted what it had to spare. Europe and North America will run out soon too. This doesn't mean the end of the internet, but it does mean it can't expand any more. People can share IP addresses, much like phone extensions without a direct dial number, but this makes certain things quite difficult.

IPv6, the new IP protocol, is the answer. To allow for major future expansion, it quadruples the number of digits used. This raises the number of the number of possible addresses from just over 4 biillion, to 4 billion to the power of 4:

(4,294,967,296)4 = 3.4 x 1038 = 340 undecillion addresses

This should keep us going for a while, but it requires us to modify our systems to handle the new standard. The problem is that IPv6 uptake is very slow and IPv6 and IPv4 cannot talk to each other. So, until the world deploys IPv6, the internet cannot expand properly.

Griffith College, by deploying IPv6, is ensuring that all our web users will be catered for. Our staff and students now have access to both IPv4 and IPv6 websites and services. Our websites are also available over both IPv4 and IPv6. This shouldn't affect people much just yet, but over the coming years as the world's users and websites begin to transition to IPv6 (some in a panic no doubt), Griffith will be there waiting for them. As part of the task force, we are also supporting others in their transition to ensure that Ireland remains at the forefront of technological development.

Dr Gavin McCullagh, Griffith College IT department

To know more about visit at http://www.gcd.ie/.