What is IPv6?

An IP address is like the home address of your device (computer, laptop, mobile etc), similar to where you live has a street address. The problem with IPv4, was it was designed in the early 1980s and they didn’t allocate enough addresses. IPv6 comes to the rescue and rolls out today (June 6th 2012).

IPv6 does have improvements over IPv4, like packet simplification, auto-configuration, mobility, and extensibility. Though the increased address space is the main benefit of this IP.

How many IPv6 addresses are there? Lets just say they have enough to allocate one to everything! This is great, because soon, more and more devices will have an IPv6 address, and as it is a end point for internet connections, more gadgets will be ‘connected’. Probably not your electric toothbrush, but likely, in the near future your fridge, tv, toaster? Either way connectivity of more devices and the greater availability of this IP means in the coming years we will easier applications converging our real world to online.

Would you like to know more? Check out the Google Video or Wikipedia Page. You may also be interested in obtaining and supplying IPv6 addresses, in which case read the APNIC paper on it here. Focus have provided an excellent infographic which summarises everything perfectly below; Click to zoom in.