Included in the development of IPv6 was a desire to increase the security of the protocol. IPv6 not only provides a greater amount of available IP addresses, but is also necessary for the long term health and development of the Internet. That would be about 340 trillion trillion trillion IPv6 addresses! So it is basically impossible for us to ever run out of IPv6 addresses the way we did with IPv4 addresses, which only had 2 to the power of 32 (about 4.2 billion) possible addresses. As you may have noticed, this means we can create 2 to the power of 128 IPv6 addresses. While an IPv4 address consists of 32 bits, an IPv6 address has 128 bits – four times as many. This may already be ringing a bell for some, as it looks quite similar to and IPv4 binary address, just much bigger. The only difference is the number system that is used to display the IP address. They do, however, use the same base system. They have a completely different notation. If you placed an IPv6 address next to an IPv4 address, it would be easy to miss the fact that the one is the successor to the other. This article assumes that the reader is already aware of how IPv4 works, at least the basics of it.

But why would someone want to use IPv6? Are there benefits and/or disadvantages to using it over IPv4? How does IPv6 differ to IPv4? How does it work? IPv6 adoption has gone from about 5% to about 36% in just the last 5 years and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. The move over has been slow, but in recent years there has been a much greater push to establish IPv6 on the Internet. Unfortunately this is not easy since IPv4 has been solidly established on the Internet. Since the conception of IPv6, there has been a slow push to transition over to the IPv6 Standard and to deprecate IPv4. In 1998 IPv6 became a Draft Standard from the IEFT (Internet Engineering Task Force) and in 2017 it became an Internet Standard. Thus, in the mid 1990s, the development of a new protocol (IPv6) was discussed. It quickly became apparent that the amount of IPv4 addresses that existed would not suffice for the massive influx of devices that came to be connected with each other. The developers of IPv4, however, never imagined that the Internet would grow at the exponential rate that it did.

This network would gradually develop into the Internet, the largest network of devices on Earth.

IPv4 is a brilliant protocol that was developed to enable communication between computers on a network. This text explains some general background information on IPv4 and IPv6. The basics of IPv4 and IPv6 Last change on

2 rules of ipv6 compression