The Basics of Ipv6

As the internet grows ever larger the number of domains registered at any given time continues to increase. Apparently almost 70,000 new domains are registered every day bringing the total number of active domains to just over 180 million domains. With all of those domains comes an increased need for servers, each of those servers needs at least 1 IP address to function properly online. Currently there are over 3 billion IP addresses in use world wide. With the current usage of Ipv4 we as a people are beginning to run low on usable IP addresses. With a total of 4.2 billion possible IP addresses it leaves little room for future growth. As the internet expands more and more IP addresses will be required not only for more websites to be stored but for more people to be able to access the internet.

This is where Ipv6 comes into play offering a solution to our problems by increasing the total maximum number of IP addresses to just over 340 trillion uniques. However there are many problems with installing and making this system usable on the current internet. Ipv4 currently sends 32 bits of data when requested this data is an IP address such as 1.1.1.2, these Ips are somewhat easy to remember or at least type. However the new Ipv6 ip addresses are much harder to remember and/or type simply because they look like this: E3D7:0000:0000:0000:51F4:9BC8:C0A8:6420

Implementing the new standard sounds great for the most part in principle, so why aren't we doing it? I mean it would open up the web for larger networks and bigger possibilities as well as make network administration easier. To begin with the new standard isn't backwards compatible with Ipv4 meaning that all of the IP addresses will need to be upgraded along with all of the networks, websites, DNS settings, server settings operating system settings and other attachments that belong to the web. That means that switching right now would block IPv6 off into a box that couldn't communicate with the mainstream IPv4 Internet, though some work is under way to better bridge the two. We can only hope that the problem is solved before we run out of IP addresses in 2010 as has been predicted by several companies such as Google.

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