As Geoff said in a recent blog post : “MWC used to be a big event for the telephone companies, but these days it’s a big event for the Internet”.
He wasn’t wrong. GSMA Mobile World Congress is the world’s biggest and most influential mobile event, this year attracting 93,000+ attendees from 200 countries. And now, more than ever, the Interent community must be a part of the conversation.
I attended the Ministerial Programme, and also spoke on a panel about Internet governance. The Ministerial Programme attracts around 1,000 delegates, mostly governments and industry, from 160 different countries.
While it is the policy and regulatory side of GSMA that brought me here, it is their membership and, ultimately, reaching out to them on IPv6 deployment, that is critical. After all, it is precisely in their territory where critical mass for IPv6 is expected to occur in the near future.
When speaking with them, I presented a few important facts about the Internet of today and tomorrow.
- Three out of seven billion people will be connected to the Internet by the end of this year
- Almost two of the three billion of users connected come from the developing world
- In the developing world, we have growth rates of 95 per cent or more every five years
- And this is only people. But we know that people are not the only ones getting connected to the Internet. There are also many devices.
- According to a CISCO study, by next year an estimated 25 billion devices will be connected to the network. And 50 billion by 2020.
What does 2016 look like? 25 billion devices, three billion Internet users. What does this mean? That billions of Internet unique addresses are needed.
We all know IPv4 space is almost gone. From around of 3.7 billion addresses in this space, 3.5 billion addresses already have been deployed. This leaves only 115 million IPv4 addresses and this is clearly not enough!
The point is very simple: 50 billion devices to connect in 2020 and 150 million IPv4 addresses left.
IPv6 is the answer.
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very good info.