Owen DeLong, IPv6 evangelist at Hurricane Electric, was recently interviewed for a New York Times article on IPv6 day. From the article:
What is IPv6?
Every device that connects to the Internet has an address, called an IP address (for Internet protocol), which comes in a string of numbers. IPv6 is a new protocol for Internet addresses. The old protocol, known as IPv4, was designed to accommodate labs, universities and the military, when the Internet was being developed. That was an experimental Internet that only had 3.2 billion addresses — nowhere near enough for today’s exploding number of Web-connected computers, smartphones, tablets and game consoles.
IPv6 has a much larger address field: 3.4 x 1038. That’s enough that if you had an M&M for every address, you could fill up the Great Lakes, and take each of those M&Ms and fill the Great Lakes for each one of them. Literally the Great Lakes of M&Ms, squared.
Why should I care?
Ideally, if everything goes according to plan and all of us tech people do our jobs correctly, you shouldn’t. But in reality we care because we want the Internet to keep growing, and we want to be able to have new features and connect directly with each other.
