IP Addressing: IPv4 versus IPv6
The Internet began to grow rapidly in the early 1980s. Then, when the World Wide Web was introduced in the early 1990s, the growth exploded even more. Even before the World Wide Web, network specialists around the world saw that the growth rate would eventually exhaust the available IP addresses. They predicted that the number of devices needing to connect to the Internet would soon exceed the number of available addresses. At that time, there was only one standard IP addressing scheme. The fourth version of IP addresses, IPv4, was the first version in widespread use. Everyone knew the IPv4 addresses were unable to keep up with the rapid Internet growth.
The Internet needed a new way to address devices that ...
Get Fundamentals of Communications and Networking, 3rd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
