"In the early 1990s, internetworking wonks realized the world was not many years away from running out of Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses, the numbers needed to identify any device connected to the public internet. Noting booming interest in the internet, the internet community went looking for ways to avoid an IP address shortage that many feared would harm technology adoption and therefore the global economy."
"The most important change from IPv4 to IPv6 was moving from 32-bit to 128-bit addresses, a decision that increased the available pool of IP addresses from around 4.3 billion to over 340 undecillion - a 39-digit number. IPv6 was therefore thought to have future-proofed the internet, because nobody could imagine humanity would ever need more than a handful of undecillion IP addresses, never mind the entire range available under IPv6."
"To understand why, know that IPv6 also suggested other, rather modest, changes to the way networks operate. "IPv6 was an extremely conservative protocol that changed as little as possible," APNIC chief scientist Geoff Huston told The Register. "It was a classic case of mis-design by committee." And that notional committee made one more critical choice: IPv6 was not backward-compatible with IPv4, meaning users had to choose one or the other - or decide to run both in parallel."
Engineers in the early 1990s anticipated an IPv4 address shortage as internet usage expanded. RFC 1883, released in December 1995, defined IPv6 as the successor to IPv4. IPv6 increased address size from 32-bit to 128-bit, expanding the available pool from about 4.3 billion to over 340 undecillion addresses. The protocol intentionally made only modest operational changes and was described as conservative. IPv6 is not backward-compatible with IPv4, forcing operators to choose IPv4, IPv6, or run both concurrently. Those design choices and limited compelling new features slowed global migration, leaving less than half of users on IPv6 today.
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