Today IP addresses are typically assigned to hosts or individual computers. IPng has an address space large enough so that everything from your carpet to your light bulbs can have its own IP address. The idea is that everything will be "networked" in some fashion. You will be able to communicate with your house, your car and everything else you could possilby want to control from the comfort of wherever you happen to be. Your house would be its own subnetwork and might not necessarily connect to the internetwork unless you really wanted to network your sprinklers to the world. More sophisticated interfaces for information gathering and retrieval would be connected to the internetwork in a transparent, on-demand way probably at speeds upwards of 56Kbps.
IPng also provides mechanisms for specifying routes which could allow a host to connect to a service provider based on location or transmission medium. For example if you are connecting over an interface such as an ISDN phone line from home you could specify a route through one provider then get in your car and specify a different provider (perhaps a cellular provider) without breaking the connection.
In the future of computing there will be no concept of an operating system that you will have to upgrade year after year. There will be no applications that you will have to install. All computing will be interface and data driven. If you pick up your painting tools you will be using the paint program. If you are dealing with the company figures you will be in the spreadsheet application but if you are looking at your personal expenses you will be in the home finance application.
In cars today we have sophisticated computers monitoring and adjusting in real time but we have no concept of an operating system or an application that we are running. In the same way we will interact with our computers in a much more intuitive way driven by what we are doing or what we want to look at.
The computer of tomorrow will bear very little resemblance to the computers we stare at on our desks today. Occasionally we will use the keyboard interface to do typewriter like things but the keyboard and the mouse will give way to interfaces much more specific to the task at hand.
Our telephones and televisions will be integrated and there may not be any distinction between the two. If you are watching a movie and someone calls they may appear somewhere in the visual space of the broadcast and begin talking to you. In addition to this integration the call may be coming over the same medium as the broadcast and, at the same time, your children may be browsing the Smithsonian Institution over the same line.
The IPng Area Directors of the Internet Engineering Task Force are planning a deployment of the new protocol sometime in the next three to seven years. They are proposing a gradual transition lasting at least ten years and possibly for the lifetime of the new protocol.
As computers are becoming cheaper, faster and more powerful, there will soon be a point where every device made will have a computer. Today one would be hard pressed to find an electronic device without some sort of computer in it. Once the computer big boys realize the future is not in that box sitting on your desk they may begin to think about how we will be using these intelligent devices and progress to the next level of computing. They may wish to squeeze every last dime out of us for upgrades before they do it so someone has to push them ahead.
As you are reading this, the phone companies and the cable television companies are talking (read fighting) about who is going to carry information to you. There are good arguments for either side. When all the dust settles we will have a global super network capable of carrying huge amounts of data at very high speeds on which to build our future computers and that is a good thing.