An Introduction to IPv6

Playboy writes "Here is a great introduction to IPv6 in general, the technological background, the reasons for the move and the effects this will have on networks. Understandable for network novices like me but still includes many details on the technological side of things."

Comments

Off by several orders of magnitude

[Old Man Kensey]

I think the author typoed on his number of addresses (maybe he tried to insert an exponent and then in a cut-n-paste it got dropped). Back-of-the-envelope calculations tell us:

30 bits ~= 1 billion
Current world population ~= 6 billion or so
128 bits ~= 2^98 billion ~= 10^30 billion

Even when there are 256 billion people running around this planet (and, one assumes, others as well), there will be 90 bits of address space for each of us. Not that anybody is going to get 90 bits of address space even now, but if I read this right that's 26 SLA's, or a little less than 5 bits of SLA address space.

Facts are incorrect

[minion]

I'm not an IPv6 wiz... In fact, I know little about it, as I'm not concerned about moving towards it (like most of the internet, we don't care)..

Either way, the current 4 billion addresses is taken from: 2^32, which yields: 4,294,967,296 (yeah yeah, subnets not withstanding).

IPv6 should have 2^128 available addresses to use, which yeilds: 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,45 6

The article says enough for every person on the planet to have 10. There are 6 billion people on this planet. So....

6,000,000,000 x 10 =
60,000,000,000

Hmm... I'm not even sure what you'd call that number above, but its a lot more than 60 billion.

Conservative estimate

[thermopylae300]

"...there will now be enough IPv6 addresses available for each person on the planet to have 10 of their very own."

3.4 × 1038 / 6.3 × 9 = 10*

*(Answer is in base 5.3 x 1028)