A piece of techno-jargon the online community is going to hear plenty about in the next year or two is IPv6.

Internet Protocol Version 6, to give it its full name, is being touted as the saviour as the internet heads for a capacity crunch.

For once it's not the speed of internet access that's the problem. The issue is overpopulation. The growing number of people connecting more and more PCs and other gadgets is fast using up the available addresses.

More than 1.4 billion people are online and the total is doubling every four or five years. That means the 4 billion addresses available under the reigning 32-bit IPv4 addressing scheme will be taken by 2011, according to an OECD report.

The consequence of that, the OECD says, could be that new internet users or mobile devices will not be able to connect. The OECD and groups involved in internet governance, such as InternetNZ, are therefore urging Governments to take the lead by adopting IPv6.

Some already are. The United States had a deadline of June for every Government agency to make its internet infrastructure IPv6-compatible.

Korea has set a similar goal for public institutions by 2010 and is committed to installing IPv6 equipment in every newly built communications network.

And the Chinese Government has begun rolling out an IPv6 network, called China Next Generation Internet. The Beijing Olympics will be used to test mobile devices and intelligent transport and security systems running on IPv6.

InternetNZ wants our Government to make a formal statement of intent to migrate in the forthcoming Digital Strategy Version 2.0, which is being finalised for release in the next month or so.

"The world is running out of IPv4 space and IPv6 will be the way of the future - there's no doubt about that," says InternetNZ executive director Keith Davidson.

Whereas a typical IPv4 address might be 172.16.254.1, an IPv6 address - 2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7334 is an example - is much longer, and can have more information encoded in it. According to Davidson, that means an IPv6 address can accommodate not just internet routing details, but is inherently more secure than an IPv4 address.

Aside from the Government, Telecom - as owner of much of the country's telecommunications infrastructure - has a key part to play in the IPv6 migration. Encouragingly, Davidson says, both are "increasingly on side" with the need to make the move. "Progress is coming but it's a little slow."