Did you know that today, June 6th, 2012, the Internet launched a newer better version of itself? It sounds implausible, sensational even, and definitely parodic. But it actually happened, and it took the efforts of several major Internet Service Providers and other Big Media sites to make it happen.
What’s different?
Mostly nothing, unless you are a computer, or a mega extreme nerd (don’t worry, we love you too). What’s changed is the “address” that the sites and computers connect to the internet. For 30 years, all of our addresses have looked something like “196.251.133.217”. Computers and other networked devices read this and know exactly where to send data. This protocol for digital communication is called Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4). The new IP scheme is IPv6, this is what launched today.
IPv4 supports numbers from four sets of three digits ranged from numbers 0-254. Because of the various combinations we get around 4.3 billion different individual IP addresses. If you are connecting to the internet, you have an IP address. If you are visiting a website, that site has an IP address. You can see how you might start running out of these finite addresses at some point. IPv6 came along to prevent the running out of addresses for the foreseeable future.
The new layout contains eight sets of four characters utilizing numbers 0-9 and letters a-f. The combination of characters in an IPv6 allows for over 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 addresses.
Over 8 major ISPs agreed to do a rollout of the new addressing scheme today. Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo also changed their sites to the IPv6 addressing format.
It’s not likely that this will affect you in any way, but at least you’ll know that there are numbers out there that you will die before you can your wrap your head around.
Meet the new internet. Same as the old internet, except with a lot more zeroes.