For whatever reason this week, I’ve take a bit of an interest in IPv6. For all your non-techies out there, this likely won’t mean all that much, so you’ll just have to bear with me. I hate to put two tech articles back to back but this is just the way it will be…

Now before I begin, I want to make one thing perfectly clear, I am NOT an expert on this matter and just because I say something, that doesn’t mean that it’s true. Granted I have studied a good number of hours this week on the matter, but that still does not make me an expert.

Let start with the basics, IPv4 (the current IP scheme) uses 4 blocks of 3 numbers each, separated by a period. An example of this would be 192.168.125.241. IPv6 however uses 8 blocks of 4 HEXADECIMAL characters each separated by a colon. And example of this would be 3ffe:1900:4545:0003:0200:f8ff:fe21:67cf. Now I have a hard enough time remembering an IPv4 address….how in the world could I be expected to memorize something like that?!?!

Now the reason for trying to move to IPv6 is quite obvious, MANY more addresses. The problem with this, however, is that IPv6 is NOT backwards compatible with IPv4. So in order for this change to occur, all the computers in the world need to switch over to IPv6 at roughly the same time. And for those that argue that they can run both, one along side another, the cost to do so is quite high. And sure, there are a number of sites that have started to do that, but is everyone really going to follow suit? I’ll let you make your own call on that one….

The final point that I want to make here, is that yes, at SOME point we are going to run out of IPv4 addresses, I’m just not convinced that IPv6 is really the answer here. I mean, it’s COMPLETELY different and for the most part, NOT backwards compatible. Backwards compatibility has been the backbone of technological growth in the past, and more then likely will continue to be in the future. By making things backwards compatible, you give time for people to transition over to the new technology. You can’t possibly expect them all to switch all at once….. And I will admit, backwards compatibility has caused problems in the past, but it’s something that MUST be included as we push forward technologically….

I would invite anyone to do their own research into this. Google’s always a good place to start.