Everyone knows that every machine connected to the Internet has a unique address called an IP address or IP address.And since the development of the Internet in the early 1980s, we have used IPv4, or Internet Protocol Version 4 , to assign unique addresses to every computer on the Internet.
Difference between IPv4 and IPv6
In this post, I’m going to give you some of the basics that are very easy to understand. Before we actually make the distinction between IPv4 and IPv6, we need to know some of the basics of IPv4. Finally, I’ll tell you the difference between the two at a basic level.
First, let’s check the IP address of our computer – it looks like this: 127.128.165.255.
Looking at this for the first time is pointless, but it really applies to all the routers that do the processing.
That’s how:
The IP address 127.128.165.255 is 01111111100000001010010111111111.
If you count the number of bits, it is 32. Therefore, any IPv4 address is 32 bits long.
How does the conversion work?
32-bit 01111111100000001010010111111111 is split into 4 blocks, each with 8 bits.
So it becomes: 01111111-10000000-10100101-11111111.
Now, when each 8-bit block is converted to decimal and separated by a dot (.), It becomes 127.128.165.255. The last possible IPv4 address is 255.255.255.255.
Now that you assign each computer a unique IP address, the possible numbers are 2 powers of 32, which equals roughly 4.29 billion. Therefore, only 4.29 billion people on earth will then be able to use the Internet. However, there are already 5.5 billion mobile phones! Thus, this addressing system is starting to run out. To overcome this, IPv6 or Internet Protocol version 6 was introduced .
IPv6 overview
IPv6 is a 128-bit address and is called the successor to IPv4 and is used to update the Internet protocol. As we have seen, IPv4 is separated by a dot every 3 hops. In the case of 128-bit IPv6, the separation is done with a colon (:).
So the IPv6 address looks like this: 3aae: 1901: 4545: 3000: 200a: fff: fe21: 6741
The total number of possible addresses using IPv6 is so great that now all machines, including phones, computers, refrigerators, ovens, etc., may have a unique address.
