We have been talking regarding the transition to IPv6 and the scarcity of IPv4 for years. While this transition began in the early 2000s, it is still far from complete, since the majority of Internet users in the world continue to use the old addresses.
How to explain this delay? This is what we will try to see in this mini-series of two articles. This first part goes back to the basics by explaining what an IP address is and the difference between IPv4 and IPv6. We will then see the concrete benefits of the new standard at all levels of the Internet.
IP addresses, a basis of the internet
The Internet is built on computers that communicate with each other. Although it has changed since its creation in the 1960s in the form of ARPANET, this basic principle has remained. Whether you are viewing a website from your iPhone, your Mac is checking Apple’s servers to see if an update is available, or your Apple TV is displaying streaming a video from Netflix’s servers, it’s always a series of interconnected computers. Communication between these devices is done on the model of postal addresses, through an address called “IP” which must be unique.
