this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2024
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They went just a teeny tiny little bit overboard with the address space. Ipv4 is four groups between 0 and 255, ipv6 is eight groups of four digit hex, 0000 to ffff - e.g the Google DNS ipv4 address is 8.8.8.8. the ipv6 one is 2001:4860:4860:0:0:0:0:8888 (thankfully at least some devices allow using :: to skip all the zeroes, so it's "just" 2001:4860:4860::8888)
But we now have enough ipv6 addresses to give more than 10 billion ipv6 addresses to every single grain of sand on earth, and still have some left over.
as is seemingly standard for bit range increases. y2038 is now y2,900,000,000 due to added a silly amount of bits.
They never wanted to worry about address space size again. And this makes subnetting much easier. I have a /56 allocation so I could do 256 /64 subnets. I hope that at some point home routers will have the option for seperate subnets built in. This way you could easily have guest, IoT, work or whatever networks without NAT.
One thing you have to consider though is that the minimum network size that allows autoconf is /64 and that because of the privacy extension a device usually has 3-4 IPv6 adresses.