Computer Science Principles The Internet - 03 Addressing and Routing Information - 03 Scaling up the Internet from IPv4 to IPv6

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When IPV4 was created, it supported over four billion devices that could connect to the internet.

However, as more and more devices were created, the number of available addresses started to run out.

So another way needed to be created.

Luckily, the internet protocol's designed to scale and expand to meet new demands.

So in 1995, a new version of the internet protocol was created, it's called IPV6.

Now you might ask yourself, what happened to IPV5? Well, part of how specifications are developed is that new ones could be created and designed, but when they get to a certain point they're given a name.

In 1979, an experimental protocol called the internet stream protocol was assigned the number five, but it was never finalized.

In 1995, the Internet Engineering Task Force, or IETF, needed to create a new way to provide addresses on the internet, now to expand beyond the four billion limit of IPV4.

The result was to increase the number of bits used to store an address.

IPV4 uses 32 bits.

IPV6 uses 128.

With 128 bits, we can store a bunch of addresses.

That is 340 undecillion unique addresses, or 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses.

That's more addresses than there are atoms on the surface of the planet.

If you took a smartphone and put that in your hand, and had it represent the number of IPV4 addresses, the size of IPV6 addresses would be the size of our solar system.

Now during the transition from IPV4 to IPV6, devices will migrate over time as the entire world of network hardware and computer software is updated.

New operating systems support something called dual stack, where both IPV4 and IPV6 are supported at the same time.

Allowing your devices to work regardless if the network hardware is updated or not.

So what does an IPV6 address look like? Since IPV6 uses 128 bits, we can represent that as binary numbers.

These 128 bits are organized into eight 16 bit sections.

Each 16 bit block is converted to hexadecimal.

And it's separated with a colon.

This is a full IPV6 address.

But there are some additional ways to compress it.

Leading zeros can be removed.

But we need to make sure that each section has at least one digit.

Some addresses have a lot of zeros.

And they usually are special types of IP addresses for private or different types of network objects.

For example, you can have an address like this.

This address can be written in shorthand this way.

To rebuild the original number, the network knows that there must be eight sections.

And it knows the first and the last, and fills in the blanks with zeros.

Using IPV6, the world has more than enough addresses.

So as more and more devices connect to the internet, they will all have a protocol to allow them all to communicate with each other.