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The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has warned that shifting to the new addressing scheme was “critical for the future of the internet economy” and was likely to affect “all businesses that require IP addresses for their growth".

It has urged governments to mount extensive education campaigns and encourage its adoption by specifying it in tenders for work.

Mr Cerf said the rise of the “internet of things” where ordinary objects such as light switches, radiators and cars are connected to the net has accelerated the rate at which the IP addresses are being used up.

He also predicted that as the supply of IPv4 addresses dries up, companies will scramble to secure the last ones, accelerating the rate of exhaustion. IPv4 adddresses may run out in 2009, he warned web users.

IP address timebomb

IP addresses are as crucial to websites as street addresses are for businesses but some network engineers predict that we will run out of them in two years. What is the solution?

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Mr Cerf, 65, helped build Arpanet, the original internet, and is credited along with Bob Kahn with inventing the TCP/IP protocols - the standards on which the internet runs - in the early 1970s. He is now a consulting engineer and in 2005 became the “chief internet evangelist” at Google.

He said: “The technical stuff for IPv6 is done. IPv6 is ready. This is a business issue in the internet service industry. The ISP community round the world needs to pay attention.”

He said he had been speaking to ISPs, including AT&T and Verizon in the United States and BT, the biggest ISP in the UK. He said the bulk of companies had no idea about IPv6 and the ISPs were not informing them.

“They are persisting in the ‘nobody is asking for this’ mentality," he said "They are not valuing business continuity as they should.

“When they finally wake up, there is going to be a mad scramble for IPv6 and they won’t implement it properly.”

He said consumers needed to be aware of IPv6 and to start checking that the products they buy are IPv6 compatible.

Most software companies such as Microsoft and many hardware companies are already making their products IPv6 ready.

It is thought that, properly handled, the effect of the introduction of IPv6 on consumers will be minimal, although eventually home routers may have to be upgraded or swapped so they can use the longer addresses.

In Asia, governments in China, Korea and Japan have led the roll out of the new protocol.

The Department for Business said it was consulting with companies and ISPs about the best way to encourage the implementation of IPv6.

A Cabinet Office spokesman said: “Government technology experts are confident that an efficient use of current public IP addresses and a move to IPv6 as the need arises will avert any risk of address exhaustion in Government systems."

Some large companies are already using IPv6 as it helps ease administration on large internal networks.

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