What is IPv6?

 Yesterday June 8th was celebrated as the World IPv6 Day. What is IPv6 and why is it so important? We all know what an IP address is and it is of the form 203.321.234.233 It is a set of four numbers which range from 1 to 255. Each unique number is used to identify every device connected to the internet.

 Now the limitation with this format is that the number of possible combinations is only 4 billion and that is less now as the number of devices online are increasing greatly. Apart from desktops and laptops, now there are millions of smart phones and thousands of tablets and gaming consoles which have online presence and thus an ip address is required for each. Not to forget that all the websites also have their own ip addresses. As of June 5th ,there are 232,000,000 websites in the world. That is huge! 

 What all this adds up to is that Internet is getting full. If nothing is done soon than there won't be many ip addresses left and you won't be able to access the internet. Here is where IPv6 comes in.

 The concept exists since long time, however the implementation has started now.IPv6 is “Internet Protocol Version 6″. The major difference between IPv6 and IPv4 is the difference of bits. IPv6 uses 128 bits while IPv4 uses only 32. A typical IPv6 address will look like:2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334. That is the IPv6 system is capable of 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses (340 uni decillon or 3.4 x 10^38) addresses compared to the 4 billion of IPv4. 

 There will be lots of problem in this migration. The biggest problem is going to be the fact that IPv6 devices and IPv4 devices cannot interact with each other directly as there is a lot of difference between the two. The most visible difference comes in the fact that IPv4 addresses are seperated by dots and IPv6 are seperated by colons. The only solution seems to be that companies will have to offer their online services in both the versions till there is complete migration to IPv6 which may take a very long time.

On 8 June, 2011, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Akamai and Limelight Networks were amongst some of the major organizations that offered their content over IPv6 for a 24-hour “test drive". Also there is a detailed wiki page about this which you may check.