Networking | More Address Space

Still, the most obvious and most important advantage of IPv6 is that the addresses are longer, which makes for a much, much larger address space. The actual number of individual addresses that is possible with 128 bits goes beyond numbers anyone except astronomers and particle physicists is familiar with:

340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456

The number of possible IPv4 addresses seems mundane by comparison:

4,294,967,296

The 128-bit address space is large enough to have 155 billion IPv4 Internets on every square millimeter of the Earth’s surface, including the oceans. In U.S. measurements, the figure is even bigger: it’s enough to supply every square inch of the Earth’s surface with the equivalent of a hundred trillion IPv4 Internets. Or what if the amount of address space used would really have doubled every five years for years to come, rather than level off around the turn of the millennium? Even at this incredible exponential rate, the IPv6 address space would last until the year 2485.

The original goal of providing more address space to avoid running out of addresses altogether isn’t as urgent as it once was, because IPv4 addresses are no longer used up at anexponential rate. There may even be enough IPv4 addresses for decades to come, although that’s certainly a dangerous assumption to make. On the other hand, there aren’t even enough IPv4 addresses for each person on Earth to have just one, and North America and Europe already use many more than a single address per person. So while the exact moment when the IPv4 address space will run out remains a topic for heated debate, it’s obvious that at some point it will.

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