June 8, 2011, is World IPv6 Day (source: Nerdiest Holiday Ever: World IPv6 Day). It might be frivolous to celebrate now, but wait a couple years (or months) and see what happens to IPv4. Here’s a clue, we’ve run out of IPv4 addresses – they’re all taken/owned by companies.
You can think of IPv6 in a couple ways. It’s like making the other 8 planets (yes I maintain Pluto is a planet) inhabitable when Earth runs out of livable space.
With IPv6 every IPv4 address could have it’s own IPv4 address.
While IPv4 allows 32 bits for an Internet Protocol address, and can therefore support 232 (4,294,967,296) addresses, IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, so the new address space supports 2128 (approximately 340 undecillion or 3.4×1038
) addresses. Source: wikipedia | IPv6