What’s IPV4 and IPV6… And what thing lead to the need to IPV6?
In: Technology
IP addresses, including IPv4 and IPv6, are a piece of data used to tell apart one computer from another in a network. Quite like your home address (or PO box in a mail office)
IPv4 has one major problem, which is that it can only store 32 bits of data (about 4 billion different addresses). Imagine filling out a billing address form, but the address field has a 10-character limit. Meanwhile, there are more than 4 billion IPs needed on the internet. The number looks like much, but it’s really not since some computers take more than one IP address. Some even take up a whole group of them (a subnet).
Which is why IPv6 is a thing. It’s basically a longer version of IPv4 which lets you store more data in it.
Though, the internet and the entities managing them have used funky methods to prevent filling up these 4 billion IP addresses, because switching to IPv6 is a hassle and only a few percent of software and hardware support IPv6.
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