About two decades ago, engineers created a technology called IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6). This technology solved a problem that its predecessor, IPv4, had: the limited number of concurrent devices on the internet, which amounts to 4.3 billion. But even though this technology has been available since 1999, few have used it.
In 2011, major companies such as Google, Facebook , and Yahoo made an effort to introduce IPv6, and in 2012 they relaunched their services, this time with IPv6 addresses.
At the time, there was no clear sign that the world would adopt the protocol, even if giant companies were using it. The result would be complex and multi-layered addresses using NAT, which allowed multiple users to have the same public IP. But statistics published earlier this week by InternetSociety show that IPv6 is already in use for 25% of global addresses, and it's slowly but steadily increasing.
A Google software engineer who had been working on IPv6 for years said “While it is clear that we have a road ahead of us, such as implementing the protocol on the remaining 75% of the Internet, it becomes clear that IPv6 is here to stay and is capable of supporting the growth we expect in the coming decades,”.
But how large is the capacity of the protocol? The answer is unexpectedly large as it equals 2128=340.282.366.920.938.463.463.374.607.431.768.211.456
