What is IPv6? A general guide all about it
What is IPv6? An IP address is known as your digital identity. An IP address is a network address that your computer holds so that various internet services can know where to send emails and other various stuff. Securing your IP address is as important as you make sure your physical identity card of any means does not get lost or stolen as it can result in identity theft and can be very well misused in more ways than you can imagine.
IPv6 or Internet Protocol Version 6 is a vast network layer that is spread out for computers, in turn, to be able to communicate through various means. IPv6 was first designed in the year 1998 by a group of Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) based in the United States. What are the pros and cons of IPv6? What are the features that are provided by it? How does it work? Let’s understand every single aspect thoroughly and try to understand the most from this article.
How does IPv6 work?
Instead of the traditional 32-bit addresses that were used in the IPv4, addresses with 128 bits can now be acquired. It also includes a scope field to recognize the types of applications that can access the address. Although IPv6 does not support broadcast addresses, it rather uses multicast addresses for broadcast, in simpler words creating a different case called the anycast for broadcasting purposes. Most of the other algorithms and address store is pretty much the same as the traditional IPv6.
What are the pros and cons of IPv6?
| Advantages of IPv6 | Disadvantages of IPv6 |
| 1. Reliability | 1. Conversion takes a lot of time and resources |
| 2. Stronger Security | 2. Communication Gap |
| 3. Ability to handle numerous nodes | 3. Non-cost effective |
| 4. Efficiency in routing | 4. Compatibility issues |
| 5. Security Strength | 5. Complex address issues |
| 6. Faster multitasks | 6. DNS issues |
Above are the various advantages and disadvantages incurred due to IPv6. Although it is very fast and reliable and considered a better option, the changes that are required to make to switch from IPv4 is so tedious and laborious and cause various issues while switching too. Especially having issues with compatibility and being cost heavy, it is indeed taking a long time for the world to be able to move from the traditional IPv4 to the newer IPv6.
Also Read: What is Google Crawling? How are SEOs helped by it?
Why is IPv6 required?
As of IPv4, it consists of 32 bits making it only possible to store 2^32 addresses which sum up to 4.2 billion addresses which are eventually coming short of the number of devices that are connecting every day. IPv6, consisting of 128 bits can store 2^128 addresses which means it can store 340282366920938463463374607431768211456 or simply 3.4 x 10^38 addresses. Yeah, that’s a huge number and would be more than adequate for us. Hence, for the number of growing devices, the switch has to be made for each one to have a unique and specific address to be able to communicate and connect.
Various features of IPv6
- The most prominent one is the Larger Address Space
- With the new IPv6, the header is now simplified and is much easier to process in comparison to the IPv4
- IPv6 supports auto-configuration and would not require dynamic host configuration protocol.
- Strong security is also one of the most prominent features that come along the IPv6
- Being able to support anycast
- Extensibility
How IPv6 is faster than IPv4?
Is there a speed difference between IPv4 and IPv6? There is now no obvious solution to this question, and there may not be one until IPv6 is widely used in the future. IPv4 may have a minor advantage in terms of performance, but the gap between the two protocols is not that significant. The response time of 22 domains in 6 distinct locations was evaluated by Sucuri, and the results showed that IPv6 is somewhat slower than its predecessor, although the difference is negligible and amounts to only a fraction of a second. A human being who is perusing the internet most likely would not see this at all. The speed test revealed that the response time might be altered by location as well, which was another finding.
Conclusion – What is IPv6?
With that, we have understood some of the basics of IPv6 and would have the general knowledge required to get ready for the future and to welcome the transition from IPv4 to IPv6. Hope this article answered all of the questions that you might be having regarding the IPv6