World IPv6 day - how many addresses are possible now? (Counting Techniques)

Previously IP addresses were of the form xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, e.g. 196.168.0.1 or 10.0.0.1 - In each of these four sections, there are 2⁸ possibilities, that is 256. Everything from 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255. This gives a total of 2³² possible IPv4 addresses (approximately 4.3 billion addresses).

 

So, we use the internet too much and we've used up all 4.3 billion addresses. Hence, the introduction of IPv6, which consists of many more.

 

IPv6 addresses are written in 8 groups of four hexadecimal digits, for example 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334 (from wikipedia). Each hexadecimal digit can be one of the numbers 0 to 9 or the letters a, b, c, d, e, f, which gives 16 options or 2⁴ options. This means that each set or 4 can have (2⁴)⁴ = 2¹⁶ with 8 groups this is (2¹⁶)⁸ = 2¹²⁸ which is about 3.4 × 10³⁸ individual addresses. More than enough to last us the next few years!