Subscribe to our RSS FeedThere is a growing concern of shortage of IP addresses for the internet. It is expected that the internet might “MAX out” in a few years time.
IPv6 is short for “Internet Protocol Version 6″. IPv6 is the “next generation” protocol designed to replace the current version Internet Protocol, IP Version 4 (”IPv4″).
Most of today’s internet uses IPv4, which is now nearly twenty years old. IPv4 has been remarkably resilient in spite of its age, but it is beginning to have problems. Most importantly, there is a growing shortage of IPv4 addresses, which are needed by all new machines added to the Internet.
Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is a network layer for packet-switched internetworks. It is designated as the successor of IPv4, the current version of the Internet Protocol, for general use on the Internet.
IPv6 fixes a number of problems in IPv4, such as the limited number of available IPv4 addresses. It also adds many improvements to IPv4 in areas such as routing and network auto-configuration. IPv6 is expected to gradually replace IPv4, with the two coexisting for a number of years during a transition period.
IPv6 supports 2128 (about 3.4×1038) addresses, or approximately 5×1028 addresses for each of the roughly 6.5 billion people alive today. In a different perspective, this is 252 addresses for every star in the known universe - a million times as many addresses per star than IPv4 supported for our single planet. These examples, however, have an underlying and incorrect assumption that the goal of IPv6 is the dense assignment of unique addresses to every possible entity.
A lot of information is available at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6
