And before I even write the first sentence! Just from the headline! Yeah, that’s the deal with tech stories sometimes. They’re important but you feel like you need an advanced degree in Computer Science to just know what’s being talked about.
Here’s the deal. On Wednesday, the first set of websites to adopt the new IPv6 networking standard is set to go live. Right now, everything (smartphones, PC, servers, anything connected to a network) is running on IPv4.
IPv4, though, offers only 4.3 billion addresses (2 to the 32nd power, or 4,294,967,296, to be precise). That may sound like a lot, but there are ever more devices to connect to the Internet, and many of the IPv4 addresses are inaccessibly squirreled away by organizations that got large tracts of them earlier in the history of the Internet.
But IPv6 has more:
IPv6 to the rescue! It offers 340 undecillion addresses (2 to the 128th power, or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456, to be precise).
There are large organizations being dedicated to explaining to average palookas why this fundamental altering of the underpinnings of the Internet is so important. I WISH THEM LUCK.