How many digits/letters and colons or characters does an IPv6 string have?

How many digits/letters and colons or characters does an IPv6 string have?

As an IT aspirant and entry level professional you must have always wonder about what is the deal with the new IPv6 int the market. 

If this question is brothering you then you are on right page.

lets move to understand what IPv6 is.

The growth of Internet with its need for more addresses is a main factor driving the need for a new version of the Internet Protocol. 

Currently there are estimated to be more than 100 million computers connected to the Internet. Well, it’s is not exactly known when the Internet run out of addresses. In the future, the number of devices connected to Internet is going to go up at a greater rate. 

Many of the devices such as phones, automobiles will require network connectivity. This rises the demand for more IP addresses. To overcome different problems related to the Internet, it was suggested the necessity to move from version 4 to version 6 of the Internet Protocol. 

These are some limitations of IPv4 which force the need of IPv6,

i) Insufficient IP address space

ii) Address prefix allocation

iii) Data security

IPv6 Header

IPv4 addresses are represented in dotted-decimal format. The 32-bit address is separated along 8-bit boundaries. 

For IPv6, the 128-bit address is separated along 16-bit boundaries. The resulting representation is called colon-hexadecimal.

An example of an IPv6 address is: 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334

IPv4 - 32 bits which allow for 232 or 4,294,967,296 possible addresses.

IPv6 - 128 bits which allow for 2128 or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456(3.4*1038) possible addresses.

Hope this was helpful