IPv6 Address and Address Notation and Prefix Representation
Increasing the size of IP addresses from 32 bits to 128 bits expands the address space to a gargantuan size, thereby ensuring that we will never again run out of IP addresses, and thereby allowing flexibility in how they are assigned and used. Unfortunately, there are some drawbacks to this method, and one of them is that 128-bit numbers are very large. The size makes them awkward and difficult to use.
Computers work in binary, and they have no problem dealing with long strings of ones and zeros, but humans find them confusing. Even the 32-bit addresses of IPv4 are cumbersome for us to deal with, which is why we use dotted decimal notation for them unless we need to work in binary (as ...
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