With the announcement of the release of IPv4 came the birth of the internet as we know it. Before IPv4, devices were not able to communicate with each other at all. Out of the internet protocol version, 4 came approximately 4 billion IP addresses. At the time, it seemed like more than enough to sustain us for many years. And to be fair, many years did go by since the first IPv4 address was allocated. However, it didn’t take long to realize that the amount of IPv4 addresses was quickly dwindling. Engineers tried their best to solve that problem but to no avail. All they could do was come up with a solution that helped slow down the depletion of IPv4 but did not solve the issue permanently.
However, the predecessor of internet protocol version 4 was already in the works. Internet protocol version 6 was introduced over two decades ago but has not been fully implemented yet due to incompatibility with our current devices. Luckily enough, we do have technology that helps translate between IPv4 and IPv6, though this means we cannot fully use IPv6 without using IPv4. Because IPv4 is no longer available to be allocated by the RIPE NCC, people have been buying and selling bulks of those addresses in the IP transfer market, and it even started with IPv6 as well. Check out Prefixbroker.com for more about the market and additional information.
But let’s get on with explaining why IPv6 will be superior once we have it fully implemented.
Insane amount of addresses
The internet protocol version 4 from the 80s is a 32-bit IP address. If you do the math, that means that with IPv4 we got a little over 4 billion IP addresses. Now, at the time, the world population was a bit over 4 billion. Now in 2023, the world population just got to 8 billion. More people than ever before are using the internet and there are a lot more devices nowadays that can connect to the internet, we have smart cars for crying out loud. So those 4 billion addresses were basically nothing.
The internet protocol version 6, however, is a 128-bit IP address. Doing that math there, you will see that we could get more addresses than we could even imagine. Literally, try imagining 340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses. Triple trillions… Our great-grandchildren will have more IP addresses than we did with IPv4 right now.
No longer any need for NAT
One of those temporary solutions we mentioned before that engineers came up with to try and slow down the depletion of IPv4 was NAT or Network Address Translation. It basically means that in a household, or an office, instead of all the devices having their own IP address, there is a router with one IP address for all devices in the household. Because IPv6 has so many IP addresses, we won’t have the need for NAT anymore as all devices will be able to have their own IP address.
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