Why do we need IPv6?
This Page aims to explain the needs for IPv6
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was a group created during the 1980s and provided a setting for people who used internetworking devices to communicate with each other. Here are the main reasons behind the deployment of IPv6 and the ideas which surround them.
• IPv4 addresses used up at an alarming rate. Around the year 1990 approximately ~ 536 million or one eighth of the available IPv4 IP addresses had been used. This number continued to double every five years. At this rate it was predicted that the address space for IPv4 would run out sometime between 2005 and 2011 this was declared the “exhaustion point”. Initially the IETF started on a protocol called the Next Generation Internet Protocol (IPng). This slowly led to theconcept of IPv6. Therefore a new Internet Protocol was born called IPv6.
IPv6 was first published in 1995 and became a standard in 1998.
• More networked devices. With the growth of technology will not only be computers that will need to be addressed. Household appliances such as microwaves, televisions and DVD players may be next. The existing IPv4 protocol would not be suitable for this kind of networking growth. With mobile phones connecting to the Internet and becoming more networked devices, the new IPv6 protocol has features such as stateless autoconfiguration and neighbour discovery which assigns addresses automatically. This allows users to maintain connections when moving into new networks.