Happy New Year Everyone!
Tuesday, January 1st, 2008Happy new year!
I hope everyone has had a good year last year, and an even better one this year!
It’s also the 25th anniversary of the TCP/IP protocol, which is the protocol that runs the Internet. ARPANET switched over to TCP/IP as their standard on January 1st 1983, and the Internet hasn’t looked back since.
Since it’s TCP/IPs 25th anniversary, maybe it’s a good time for the world’s servers and clients to finally make the switch to IPv6. We’ve been using IPv4 for 25 years now, now not go to the next version?
The difference between IPv4 and IPv6 is the number of valid hosts that can be connected. IPv4 addresses are 32 bits, which is equal to 4294967296 unique addresses. IPv6 addresses on the other hand, are 128 bits long, which is 4 times that, which is 2^128 or 3.4028236692093846346337460743177e+38 (that e+38 means times it by 10 38 times)
So, we aren’t going to use up the IPv6 addresses in a hurry. But don’t think we won’t use up the IPv4 addresses for a while. In 2003, the director of APNIC stated that the available space would last until about 2023. Personally I wouldn’t be surprised if they only last until about 2014. So the quicker we switch over to IPv6, the less hassle it will be in 5 to 20 years time. And don’t worry about having to wait for all the servers to switch to IPv6, IPv4 and IPv6 have been working together without the public seeming to know anything about it for some time now. I just think everyone should be using IPv6 a lot more than IPv4, since as much as we may hate to think about it, IPv4 isn’t going to last much longer as the main protocol of the Internet.
But still, hope you had an excellent New Year, and perhaps make it a New Year’s Resolution to start using IPv6 if you haven’t already 