What’s IPV4 and IPV6… And what thing lead to the need to IPV6?
In: Technology
IP addresses are just like street addresses for the internet. They identify the location of a particular service on the internet, and just like delivering mail in the real world you need a source and destination address for a package or email to get to its destination on the internet.
When IPv4 was invented the internet was much smaller and they couldn’t have predicted that the internet would get as big as it has with everything from phones, to TVs, to fridges connected to the web.
IPv4 has 4,294,967,296 possible addresses (in practice a lot less than that) and due to a combination of decades of mismanagement and overuse we were running out of addresses.
IPv6 was invented to solve that problem and has 2^128 or 340 trillion trillion trillion possible addresses.
It solved a number of other problems too, but that’s the basics.
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