IP Version 6

But firstly, what happened to IPv5? In 1979, Internet Stream Protocol (ST) was considered IP version five by industry researchers, but ST was abandoned before ever becoming a standard or widely known as IPv5.

It is common to see examples that attempt to show that the IPv6 address space is absurdly large. IPv6 supports 2¹²⁸ (about 3.4×10³⁸) addresses, or approximately 5×10²⁸ addresses for each of the roughly 7 billion people alive in 2013.

IPv6 addresses are normally written as eight groups of four hexadecimal digits. For example, 2001 : 0db8 : 85a3 : 08d3 : 1319 : 8a2e : 0370 : 7334 is a valid IPv6 address. IPv4 mapped IPv6 addresses then constitute a special class of IPv6 addresses. Such an IPv6 address has its first 80 bits set to zero, the next 16 set to one, and its last 32 bits represent the IPv4 address. For example, 0000 : 0000 : 0000 : 0000 : 0000 : ffff : c000 : 280 is the mapped IPv6 address for 192.0.2.128.

IPv6 is implemented on all major operating systems in use in commercial, business, and home consumer environments. But IPv4 still carries a high amount of Internet traffic. In 2013 the percentage of users reaching Google services over IPv6 surpassed 2% for the first time. In 2024 the USA shows 52%. China's figures show 5%, well, they do have 350 million IPv4 numbers available to their network. In other countries in the Asia Pacific region, Australia's current IPv6 usage is 30%, Japan is at 53%, and India is 73%. Click here to see these stats. Click here to see your IPv6 & IPv4 address.

Click here for the Wikipedia page on IPv6.

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