IPv4 vs IPv6 – What's the Difference?

IPv4 vs IPv6 – What's the Difference?

What is an IPv4 address?

IPv4 is the first, and most widely used, version of the Internet Protocol.

It was first launched in 1980 and is used to this day.

It's a 32-bit address and it's made up of 4 blocks – with each block being separated by a dot.

It looks something like this:

XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX

Each block can fit up to 3 digits, and the numbers in the block range from 0 to 255, in decimal values.

An example of an IP address is:

142.250.185.206

Here's another example:

69.171.250.35

These decimal numbers are converted to binary, a machine language, which is the only language computers can directly understand.

These decimal numbers, in binary, are actually 4 blocks of 8 binary digits (or bits).

This is why it is called a 32-bit address – it's an address made up of a sequence of 32 binary digits.

For example, the address you saw earlier,142.250.185.206 is:

10001110.11111010.10111001.11001110

in binary, under the hood.

So, 2^32 is a total of 4,294,967,296 unique addresses. That is the limit of IP addresses IPv4 can provide for each device to connect to the Internet.

You would think that this large number is more than enough. But, as the population continues to grow and each person owns more and more devices (and each device needs its own IP address) we have been running out of addresses for quite some time now.

What is IPv6?

IPv6 is the latest version of the Internet Protocol which was first deployed in 1998.

It's the successor of IPv4 and there will be a slow shift towards it in the future.

Whereas IPv4 is a numeric address, IPv6 uses hexadecimal, alphanumeric characters - meaning it contains numbers and letters.

In the way IPv4 uses 4 blocks that each contain up to 3 digits, IPv6 uses 8 blocks that contain 4 hexadecimal characters each.

In IPv4, each block is separated by a do t(.). In IPv6 each block is separated by a colon (:).

So, an IPv6 address looks something like this:

XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX

For example:

2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334

It's a 128-bit address, meaning that there are 2^128 addresses available.

That means there are 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses we can use on the Internet.

That is 340 undecillion addresses, which we hope will be more than enough for everyone!