ANALYSIS – World IPv6 Day is here, and with it many ISPs, websites and manufacturers are now supporting IPv6, the next generation network protocol of the internet.
For many users, though, the questions of what, when and why still await answers.
Everyone in networking knows that they should be switching to IPv6. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) realized that in 1994, when it predicted that IPv4’s 4.3 billion addresses wouldn’t be enough. Its answer was IPv6. With its 128-bit address space it can have up to 2^128 addresses — that’s 40,282,366,920 billion billion billion usable addresses. Even an interstellar internet won’t run out of numbers any time soon