Where is IPv6?
IPv6 was designed to solve the problem of IPv4 address exhaustion, as well as adding a number of additional features. Where the IPv4 address is made up of 32 bits, IPv6 addresses are made up of 128 bits; to put it into perspective, there are more than a million million IPv6 addresses for every square millimetre of the Earth’s surface. Furthermore, this means that we can add routing information into the address space without negatively affecting the size of the IPv6 addresses available for end devices; in addition, it allows local networks to automatically assign addresses from a subnet using the device’s MAC address. The transition won’t be easy. IPv6 devices can talk to IPv6 devices, and IPv4 devices can talk to IPv4 devices. Fortunately, all major recent operating systems and hardware support IPv6 natively and will automatically enable it when added to an IPv6-enabled network. The easiest transition is therefore to provide dual-hosting which will allow a computer to speak either in o
