IP Version 6

But firstly, what happened to IPv5? In 1979, Internet Stream Protocol (ST) was considered IP version five by industry researchers, but ST was abandoned before ever becoming a standard or widely known as IPv5.

It is common to see examples that attempt to show that the IPv6 address space is absurdly large. IPv6 supports 2128 (about 3.4×1038) addresses, or approximately 5×1028 addresses for each of the roughly 7 billion people alive today.

IPv6 addresses are normally written as eight groups of four hexadecimal digits. For example, 2001 : 0db8 : 85a3 : 08d3 : 1319 : 8a2e : 0370 : 7334 is a valid IPv6 address. IPv4 mapped IPv6 addresses then constitute a special class of IPv6 addresses. Such an IPv6 address has its first 80 bits set to zero, the next 16 set to one, and its last 32 bits represent the IPv4 address. For example, : : ffff : c000 : 280 is the mapped IPv6 address for 192.0.2.128.

IPv6 is implemented on all major operating systems in use in commercial, business, and home consumer environments. But IPv4 still carries the vast majority of Internet traffic. In September 2013, the percentage of users reaching Google services over IPv6 only surpassed 2% for the first time.

Click here for these latest IPv6 stats from Google.

 

Click here for further Wikipedia notes on IPv6

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