No more spam. No more "phishing" bank scams. News, pictures and short clips sent seamlessly to your phone... or your fridge. Video conferencing that works first time, no hassles. Free, stereo-quality phone calls anywhere in the world. No, it's not a utopian ideal, it's the internet that some people will begin to experience in the next 12 months.

Unknown to virtually everyone except IT engineers, the internet is being upgraded to a system called IPv6 (for Internet Protocol version 6). Just as you upgrade your mobile phone, computer or any modern appliance, the internet is undergoing a vast, gradual upgrade that will transform how it works and the way we interact with it.

The change could be compared with that from analogue to digital TV. Like that shift, the benefits are obvious to those involved, but people will have to buy new equipment and the network's infrastructure will in some cases need a virtual rebuild. It will also, in some places, create incompatibilities between old and new.

But the shift to IPv6 is largely seen as inevitable, and big companies including Microsoft and BT have already made the move.

Ironically, the US, where the internet was developed, will be among the last countries to move over as it has so much invested in the old system.

Communication over the internet works by breaking up information - an e-mail, web page, picture, or even voice call - into small chunks, called packets.

Using a combined method called TCP/IP (for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), these packets are sent by myriad routes from one computer in the world to another somewhere else.

Each packet carries an electronic label that explains what it is and where it wants to get to.

Non-terminating computers that handle the packets try to send them to the terminating machine. There, the information is reassembled using the rest of the header information. The fact that it doesn't matter what route the packet took from one computer to another explains its ability to expand, because (in theory, at least) no route is more important than any other, so you can add more as you like.

For years, TCP/IP has been stuck on version 4 which, while not perfect (you can't trace where packets originated because their headers can be "spoofed"), does work and is easy to implement.

But IPv4, as it is known, is becoming outdated. An updated version, IPv6, provides solutions to many of the problems that have cropped up.

All IPv6 does is change the format of the electronic label on each packet. But doing so has enormous consequences.

The first is to allow the internet to potentially expand virtually to infinity. Here's why. Everything connected to the internet needs its own numerical address so the packets know where to go.

IPv4 offers a maximum of just over 4 billion such addresses. That could never cope with the ambitious plans to connect not just every phone, TV and computer in the world to the internet, but also things such as kettles and fridges. IPv6 solves this by providing not four billion addresses but more than 300 billion billion billion billion (actually, 3.4 x 10^38, or 2^128).

IPv6 will also make the entire internet more secure by including a check on every single packet sent. The packet's receiver will know its origin and that it wasn't tampered with on the way. Fears about online security, which still stop many people from buying online, will be squashed.

Such precision will also make life harder for online criminals. Scams will become more visible and reveal spam's origin - making it easier to track offenders.

This tighter connection between packet and computer also makes the internet more efficient, and allows for an "always-on" connection for mobile devices - vital for new 3G mobile phones. Suddenly, the "internet on your phone" becomes a practical reality rather than a futile disappointment.

Video conferencing and internet phone calls will become more reliable and of far better quality.

Peer-to-peer sharing networks, which big media companies are building so you can download music and films direct to your living room, will become faster and more reliable. You will no longer need to walk to the local video store - just click and play.

IPv6 also helps new devices automatically configure themselves, so connecting new things to the internet will simply become a matter of sticking a wire into a socket.

Yet the bad news is that, despite being invented 10 years ago, IPv6 remains a poor cousin to the old IPv4.

This is where the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) comes in. At its recent meeting in Vancouver, the organisation, which acts as an overseer and organiser of all "technical" parts of the internet, announced that IPv6 would soon be introduced into the internet's "root" servers, so IPv6-only communication at the highest level of the internet was now possible.

Vint Cerf, who chairs Icann and is also the co-inventor of the TCP/IP system, said that Icann "has a pretty modest role in the daily operation and ultimate operation of the internet" and that "99 per cent of the internet is in private hands". But he accepted that it "has a pretty important role" in influencing what happens in the internet's domain name system.

It's a busy road ahead, but we are all going to benefit.