IPv6 for non technical people
Simone Dall'Angelo
Executive Advisor @ Twig | Bringing different technologies together to make your business goals a reality
IPv6 is the latest version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the standard that defines how devices connected to the Internet communicate with each other.
IPv6 was developed in the late 1990s because it was clear that the then-current version of IP, IPv4, would eventually run out of address space. This has now happened: IPv4 has a theoretical limit of 4.3 billion addresses, but in reality, due to the way it was originally implemented, the number of available IPv4 addresses is closer to 3.7 billion.
IPv6 addresses are 128 bits long, compared to 32 bits in IPv4. This means that there are 340.282.366.920.938.463.463.374.607.431.768.211.465 possible IPv6 addresses.?
Quite enough for much time!
In addition, IPv6 uses a different addressing format from IPv4. An IPv6 address is typically represented as eight groups of four hexadecimal digits (0-9 and A-F), separated by colons. For example: 2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:ff00:0042:8329.
While estimates vary, it is generally agreed that around 10% of users worldwide have native IPv6 connectivity—that is, their ISP provides them with an IPv6 address and they can connect directly to websites and services that also have IPv6 addresses.
Moreover, from a recent report from Cloudflare (source:?https://radar.cloudflare.com/year-in-review/2022#ipv6-adoption), 36% of devices support IPV6 worldwide.
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This series of articles is dedicated to managers who are not technical but need a quick introduction to technical topics from various subjects to be more aware in their work.