#ipv6

#ipv6

The Old Internet is built on Internet Protocol version 4. This was first used on ARPANET in 1983. It's the IP version that launched the modern Internet. It's what we - or at least the general public - think of as an IP address. Under the covers it's a 32 bit long identifier, but it's always displayed as four decimal numbers separated by periods, e.g. "208.87.129.176".

A pair of networking researchers have proposed that the Internet Engineering Task Force define support for IPv6 as a best practice for operators of DNS resolvers - the servers that translate URLs into IP addresses - and one of them hopes adoption of the idea will accelerate the demise of IPv4.