What’s IPV4 and IPV6… And what thing lead to the need to IPV6?
In: Technology
Basically the same thing. Both IPV4 and IPV6 are a way for computer to differentiate one another on a network (like the Internets). They’re basically addresses.
As for why IPV6 was made, well simply because there is one slight limitation with IPV4. IPV4 due to the way its made can only ever have a bit more than 4.2 billions addresses. Of course when people were creating it, they asked themselves “When are we gonne need more than 4.2 billions addresses?”
Well the answer was mid 2000 to 2010. They didn’t know nor expected that. So they started working on an alternative which is now known as IPV6 with 3.4 x 10^38 addresses available. Safe to say, we’re not getting there for a while… But it was too late.
One of the funny thing with computers is that when there is an issues, some people try to change things so we have a solution while other just re-use what exist. IPV4 is still widely used mostly because we chose to layer IPV4 on top of one another. If you have 4 devices at home that use the same WIFI, all of them go through a modem. That modem as an IP address. That modem has an IP address that can be available to everyone else, so they can easily talk to you. On the other hands, the devices behind have a different IP address. To reach them you need to give them the IP of the modem THEN the IP of the devices. they basically layered IPV4 on top of another. This can of course be done again and again, for example with a provider IP, modem IP, device IP. Can even go further if needed with country > provider > modem > device.
Basically, we could layer it as many time as we want. Best part, it mostly re-use what already exist and required little to no change on the network. Everything still work the same way it did for the vast majority of computer WITHOUT requiring the massive component upgrade that IPV4 to IPV6 would have required from the whole infrastructure. That’s why we still mostly use IPV4 today.
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