MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
I understood the extension of the IP range was to move from 4*32 bit octets to 6*32 (00.00.00.00 - FF.FF.FF.FF becomes 00.00.00.00.00.00 - FF.FF.FF.FF.FF.FF), hence IPv4 and IPv6
Aunty Beeb says different. [url= http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18338948 ] The old IPv4 system uses 32-bit addresses like this: 216.27.61.137 While an IP address under the new system will look more like this: 3ffe:1900:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf[/url]
Have I missed something someplace?
I guess so.
from Vince Cerf blog
The Internet we've relied on so far has space for 2^32 addresses—about 4.3 billion. The new, larger IPv6 expands the limit to 2^128 addresses—more than 340 trillion, trillion, trillion! Enough for essentially unlimited growth for the foreseeable future.
[url= http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/world-ipv6-launch-keeping-internet.html ]Full blog here[/url] (which is a link from the BBC article)
IPV6 is a whole lot more than just the number of bits in the address.
And it's already been "switched on" for quite some time, with many ISPs, internet sites, routers, and quite likely the very PC you're using right now.
You sure? Take up has been very slow. I don't know of a single network using it e.g. my company sells networking kit to Mobile Network Operators around the world and we've not come across any using it yet in their cores or RANs (I sniff a lot of traffic as part of my job debugging their networks).
A lot of the emerging nations use IPv6 extensively (China in particular) as they realised quite early there was no point in building support only for IPv4. The majority of companies are somewhere between zero and complete on their IPv6 projects but my guess is more in the starting part than the end.
IPv4 address is 32 bits represented as 4 groups of octets
IPv6 address is 128 bits represented as 8 groups of 16 bit hex digits
In a IPv6 address you can omit leading zeros in a 16 bit value and you can also replace one group of consecutive zeros with a double colon.
Challenge is a lot of operating systems support IPv6 but only a tiny handful of the typical routers deployed on broadband a capable of supporting IPv6, there are however ISP's out there already doing trials and deployments to end users.
IPv6 will be taken up initially by service providers and very large enterprise organisations.
Private IP addressing which is what you see on your home routers giving out 192.168.1.x will stay around for a long time yet.
As more and more devices become mobile and the expectation of anywhere connectivity becomes the norm there will be a move to using IPv6 at the client entry point. This will largely be transparent to the user using DHCPv6.
Activities to utilise IPv6 will largely take place at the enterprise edge initially using IPv4 to IPv6 translation even though most clients now are dual stack capable.
Yahoo already use it. They NAT behind an IPV4 address but inside it's all IPV6, apparently.