When you're on the internet, IP or Internet Protocol technology is at work. It provides the necessary details for connections and communications among your devices and the internet. The shift from IPv4 to IPv6 is marked by the length of the address. Given the multitude of devices connected online, every one of them needs a dedicated address. Routers and Wi-Fi use NAT (Network Address Translation) to establish connections and assign each device its own unique local address; however, we only share one wide area network or WAN address. IPv4 uses a 32-bit address number, providing us with a possible 4.3 billion IP addresses. That was deemed inefficient. Therefore, the number has been expanded from 32 bits to 128 in IPv6, providing us with an astronomical number of possible addresses. Contrasting version six with version four, there are some similarities within the Ethernet framework and headers, but IPv6 has several improvements. For instance, the IPv4 address is a 32-bit number divided into four segments. Also, due to the limited number of IP addresses available on IPv4, some addresses are reserved for specific purposes. Conversely, IPv6 has a substantial amount of finite numbers, allowing for more available addresses. Overall, IPv6 is a more improved solution that reduces energy use and increases efficiency. IPv6 negates the need for a NAT, a technology used to navigate IP addresses. The reason being, translating and re-translation of packets in a NAT from an address to another take up energy, nearly thrice as much as is required. With IPv6 having been in existence since 1999, the year the movie The Matrix was released, it has brought multiple improvements, including each device having its own WAN address. Looking closer at the benefits of IPv6, it provides more efficient routing without the need for managing fragmented packets in the wild. With a built-in quality of service feature, IPv6 can distinguish delay-sensitive packets. Thanks to vast address spaces in IPv6, it eliminates the need for NATs. For security measures, IPv6 includes extra header information allowing for authentication and key exchange. This offers security as every packet sent out over the internet can contain whatever content you want. Surprisingly many people use IPv6, with adoption steadily increasing, and different nations have varying rates of adoption. You can start using IPv6 if your network and ISP support it. You only need to know your device's source and destination addresses. The destination address can be found via DNS through a special DNS query, typically easy to test done using the command-line terminal. Using the dig or nslookup commands, you can ask for IPv6 addresses with `dig AAAA google.com` or `nslookup -q=aaaa google.com` The number of digits in IPv6 is so vast that virtually every device can pick a randomly generated address, giving rise to an extensive pool of address choices. Taking into account the progress made in this direction, the transition to IPv6 appears promising and exciting.
