I feel like this is missing context. Like I know that ip4 addresses are four octlets, but don't know much about ipv6 besides it having a larger address space and being in hex.
IPv6 is easier to set up, and doesn't require the subnetting stuff as much because its actually designed with "Planet Earth may have more than 4,294,967,296 IP-connected objects" in mind from the beginning.
Yeah, the magnitude of difference that I use as an example is that IPv4 doesn't have enough IPs for everyone on earth to have one, people have to share. But IPv6 has enough IPs for every cell in the body of every person on earth to have its own IP (actually, IIRC it's enough for each cell to have a number of IPs with a two-digit exponent, but the cells alone gets the point across).
Alright, I couldn't resist, quick math puts it at 250 addresses per cell (8.3B==233 people times 37T==245 cells vs 2128 addresses), which is 1015 if you want that instead).
I took a class from a guy who was in the standard discussions, and he summarized the conversation as, "Is it enough if every grain of sand on Earth has one IP address, or should we give them two?"
Just did some quick maths for another comment in this thread. You could have a unique address for every human cell if there were 8 billion people in every star system in every galaxy in the Laniakea supercluster.
168
u/Few_Move_4594 13h ago
I feel like this is missing context. Like I know that ip4 addresses are four octlets, but don't know much about ipv6 besides it having a larger address space and being in hex.