Ipv4 and Ipv6

Question

Hey guys can anyone please tell me what Ipv4 and Ipv6 is (that a beginner understand this) and what the difference is between both.

Thank you very much

Answer 1

Hi Elsayed 👋☺ sure, well, this is related to Networking. But basically, both IPv4 and IPv6 are different versions of the Internet Protocol which is used to transfer data over the internet.

First of all, IP addresses are used to provide an identification of a device or a network so they can communicate correctly with one another.

When the internet was developed back in the 80's, engineers never imagined that so many devices were going to connect to the internet, it was originally designed for approximately 4 billion devices; that's why IP version 4 (IPv4) uses 32-bit addressing, this means, it supports a little bit more than 4 billion addresses.

Later when new devices started coming out (laptops, smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, etc) engineers realized that we're running out of addresses and we need more of them, this address space was going to become exhausted eventually, so what they did to expand the address space of the internet was to invent IPv6, which uses 128-bit addressing, meaning it supports an insane amount of addresses (do the math: 2^128) it's a number with 12 commas called 340 undecillion 😅

That was simply put ☺ but if you'd like to know more about their technical differences I'd strongly advise you to search for it on Wikipedia 😊

Answer 2

@Prince sure, anytime 😊👌

Answer 3

my pleasure @Elsayed😊

Answer 4

Thank you very much for your effort!

Answer 5

Thank you for this informative and historical article.

Answer 6

in a nutshell, (assuming you know the whole point of ip addresses) ipv6 addresses are longer (and use letters), as the unused ipv4 addresses are running out

longer to allow for more combinations and a much larger total possible addresses

also

ipv6 addresses use letters and instead of 000.000.000, its 00.00.00.00.00