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IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) is a revision of the Internet Protocol (IP)
developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). IPv6 is intended to succeed IPv4,
which is the dominant communications protocol for most Internet traffic as of 2012.[1]
IPv6 was developed to deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 running out of addresses.
IPv6 implements a new addressing system that allows for far more addresses to be assigned than with IPv4.
Each device on the Internet, such as a computer or mobile telephone,
must be assigned an IP address in order to communicate with other devices.
With the ever-increasing number of new devices being connected to the Internet,
there is a need for more addresses than IPv4 can accommodate. IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses,
allowing for 2128, or approximately 3.4×1038 addresses. IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses,
allowing for only 4,294,967,296 addresses worldwide.
IPv6 addresses,
as commonly displayed to users, consist of eight groups of four hexadecimal digits separated by colons,
for example 2001:0db8:85a3:0042:0000:8a2e:0370:7334.
The deployment of IPv6 is accelerating, with a World IPv6 Launch having taken place on 6 June 2012,
in which major internet service providers, especially in countries that had been lagging in IPv6 adoption,
deployed IPv6 addresses to portions of their users. It was estimated
that the world launch resulted in an estimated 1% of all Internet users operating from an IPv6 address.[2]