Currently, our IP addresses are 4 bytes each. We are soon going to have IP addresses that are 16 bytes each.

 

What does this mean?

 

• With IPv4, there are only 2 ^ (4 * 8) = 4 billion addresses.

 

• With IPv6, there will be 2 ^ (16 * 8) addresses, or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,770,000,000 addresses!

 

 

So you ask yourself, how much is 3.4x10^38?

 

Well, first, imagine that all of the v6 IP addresses were distributed evenly over the surface of planet Earth (including the oceans).

Second, imagine the size of a square millimeter. To help you, a typical fingernail is 150-200 square millimeters.

 

Now, if the IP’s were spread out all over the earth, there would be 650 quadrillion (650 million billion) IP’s in EVERY square millimeter! That’s like cramming over 100 million of every single human on earth (100 million * 6.5 billion) into 1/200th of a fingernail ... across the whole globe!

 

Another way to look at it would be: if we were to exhaust 6 billion addresses (one for each human on earth) every single nanosecond (each frame of a filmstrip lasts about 40-50 million nanoseconds!), it would take 1.8 trillion years before we ran out! (That is 120 times longer than the age of the universe since the big bang!)

 

:)