IPv6 vs IPv4.com

IPv6 was designed to solve the problems of IPv4. The a new version of the protocol serves the same functions as IPv4. However, it does this without the same limitations of IPv4. IPv6 was designed to solve the problems of IPv4.

The a new version of the protocol serves the same functions as IPv4. However, it does this without the same limitations of IPv4.

IPv6 uses 128 bits as apposed to IPv4′s 32. This means that by comparison, IPv6 has a lot more addresses. This is also a main reason for using IPv6 in the future. As a small example of the potential in the new protocol there is a quote in one of Microsoft’s articles written by a Joseph Davies “6.6 x 10²³ addresses for every square meter of the Earth’s surface” [ Read More ]. The exact number of IPv6 addresses available is….

“340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456”

This is approximately three hundred and forty trillion, trillion, trillion addresses. Comparing this to IPv4′s address space of “4,294,967,296” or approximately four billion, it’s possible to see the shear size of IPv6 address space. To use up every single IPv6 addresses we would need to stack ten billion computers on top of each other over the entire world including the sea. The facts show that it is almost impossible to run out of IPv6 addresses.There is still a heated debate that IPv4 will not run out in the near future since the rate of addresses required by customers has slowed down in the last few years.Although, looking atthe bigger picture it is obvious that at some point in the future IPv4 will have reached its exhaustion point.

• IPv6 uses 128 bits (16 byte) long address. So the number of addresses available in IPv6 already removes the main problem that we face with IPv4 which is the inevitable exhaustion point. IPv6 is a completely classless scheme. Though the IPv6 space is large, that does not mean it is unstructured . In simple terms 64 bits are used for network identification and the remaining 64 bits are used for the host identification.