“The next wave of internet uptake will involve machine to machine connectivity linking industrial applications, smart grids, security cameras and sensors, connected home appliances and heating, venting and air conditioning equipment,” IMS Research

The internet is going viral, spreading like wildfire beyond the desktop to a plethora of mobile and home electronics devices, machines, sensors and appliances as network providers and manufacturers battle to keep pace.

According to IMS Research, the number of internet connected devices worldwide is about to break the 5 billion mark, ramping astronomically to 22 billion by 2020.

In the first wave over a billion PCs, notebooks and networking equipment had logged on to the internet; in the second wave the number of internet enabled phones surpassed connected computers.

Now a new generation of devices has been unleashed including ebook readers, netbooks, internet TVs, digital picture frames, cameras and tablets, and the uptake is accelerating rapidly.

Communications channel

Peter Sondergaard, Gartner Group’s senior vice president of research says the worldwide web is a platform for massive change and becoming the default communication channel for the world's population.

At the research company’s 25^th anniversary symposium recently he said there were 1.8 billion unique users worldwide, 250 million distinct web sites and a trillion pages online. About 31 billion Google searches were performed each month.

Locally broadband users — those on non-dial up connections — doubled in the three years to the end of 2009 and were spending longer online and finding more things to do with more kinds of devices.According to the Statistics NZ’s 2010 Household Use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Survey, we’re flocking to social networking, internet telephony and on-line purchasing. While rural users are still disadvantaged the gap is slowly closing with half now having access, compared to only one in five in 2006.

The second Internet World Internet Project survey published in March, confirmed around 83 percent of New Zealanders are internet users, up 5 percent on its 2007 survey. There had been a 15 percent rise in broadband users leaving only 16 percent on dial-up (Statistics NZ suggests 12 percent), down from 31 percent on 2007.

One fifth of home users are online at least 20 hours a week while three-fifths are active less than 10 hours a week. About 18 percent access the web via their mobile phones, up from 7 percent in 2007.

Media habits reframed

Meanwhile our media habits are undergoing a major change with about 65 percent rating the internet as the preferred source of factual information over newspapers and television. Use of social networking almost doubled between 2007 and 2009.

IMS says the next wave of internet uptake will involve machine to machine connectivity linking industrial applications, smart grids, security cameras and sensors, connected home appliances and heating, venting and air conditioning equipment.

It’s this phenomenon that raises urgent concerns that we’re running out of the unique addresses that enable devices to be recognised on the internet. IPv4, the current addressing system, can only support about 4 billion IP (internet protocol) addresses and by December 2010 there will only be around 200 days of supply left.

The solution is IPv6, which provides trillions of addresses but a reluctance to upgrade has left the internet industry in a quandary. The two numbering systems are incompatible so everything needs to move up a level, including communications software and networking equipment.

Locally InternetNZ and the IPv6 Task Force are concerned the message isn’t getting through with too many large businesses in particular having no plans to address the problem. There may be a communications breakdown between customers, business partners or general internet users unless there’s widespread compliance.  

The benefits of adopting IPv6 however will make way for the growing number of existing and new devices and the multitude of uses that have not yet been invented as part of what InternetNZ describes as the incoming 'Internet of Things'.