The UK based designer and manufacturer of electronic security and building management products, Paxton, has begun designing their networked security solutions with the upcoming new version of the Internet Protocol, IPv6. The pool of available IPv4 adresses, the given protocol standard is about to run dry as most of the possible adresses are already assigned.

Changing to IPv6 is an important task, requiring new equipment and infrastructure. IT departments will have to make significant changes to their networks and servers. Paxton is one of the companies with its own website and internal network already operating on IPv6. The existing protocol, IPv4, has been around since the 1970s, when such growth of the internet as it is given today was not even a consideration. The gradual realisation that IP addresses would one day run out completely has seen the creation of several new technologies, including Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) methods, network address translation (NAT) and the new version of the Internet Protocol, IPv6. 

IPv6 seems to be the most practical and readily available solution to the limit of IPv4.  Where IP addresses are getting bigger, the new standard IPv6 address contains 128 bits compared with 32 bits for IPv4. This means that the number of connected devices could in theory be around 3 with 38 noughts after it, therefore solving the current problem. [www.paxton.co.uk]