The Economist on IPv6

The Economist, my favorite news magazine, ran a story on IPv6 in this weeks's issue. It's very well written for the non-technical reader. They use the analogy of a city water system to explain Internet addressing:

Nobody would expect a city water system designed for 1m residents to be able to handle a 1,000-fold increase in population in just a few years. Yet that is what the internet’s fundamental addressing scheme has had to accommodate.

Support for IPv6 is already baked into most popular operating-system software. It is incorporated into Windows XP and Vista, Mac OS X 10.3 “Panther” and later, and many flavours of Unix and Linux. But operating systems are only the taps of the plumbing system: a house’s other fixtures (like set-top boxes), inside pipes (broadband modems and routers), and feeder pipes (backbone routers) must also be upgraded for the full benefits of IPv6 to become available.

I sent the article to my parents to try to explain what I do at work.

As an aside, I think The Economist is, hands-down, the best news magazine you can get. Excellent coverage from a global perspective, and the editorals are just pithy enough to get a chuckle. It's a shame that the campus bookstore doesn't carry it (ironically, some of the convenience stores in town do).