World IPv6 Day, 8 June
June 13th, 2011On June 8, more than a hundred organizations, including Google, Akamai, and Facebook, will jettison the aging Internet Protocol 4 and take the more robust IPv6 standard out for a one-day test-drive. The current addressing scheme for the internet uses IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4). But we are running out of addresses.
An IP address is the numerical address for devices on the internet (such as computers or smartphones) that allow them to communicate. The concept is similar to the telephone number for your landline phone using POTS (plain old telephone service). IPv4 uses a 32 bit address, which allows 2 to the 32 , or about 4.2 billion addresses. IPv6 uses a 128 bit address, which allows 2 to the 128, or about 340 undecillion addresses. That’s 3 followed by 38 zeros. It also has other features not contained in IPv4.
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