Why IPv6
The global pool of new IPv4 addresses has been exhausted. IPv6 provides the capacity for continued internet growth.
IPv6 provides a vastly larger supply of unique IP addresses than IPv4, whose global pool of approximately 4.3 billion addresses has been exhausted.
This larger address space supports the continued growth of internet-connected services and devices, including the Internet of Things (IoT), without relying as heavily on address-sharing technologies.
IPv6 also changes how networks configure addresses, route traffic and communicate end to end. The comparison below highlights the differences that matter most in practice.
| Capability | IPv4 | IPv6 |
|---|---|---|
| Address space | 4.3 billion addresses, exhausted | 340 undecillion addresses |
| Stateless address autoconfiguration | Not available | Built in (SLAAC) |
| Routing efficiency | Variable-length headers, fragmentation by routers | Fixed header fields, more efficient routing |
| End-to-end connectivity | Broken by NAT | Preserved end to end |
| IPsec support | Available | Standardised as part of the IPv6 protocol suite; it must still be configured correctly |
| Broadcast | Broadcast addresses send packets to all nodes in a subnet | No broadcast; link-local all-nodes multicast is used instead |
| Device scale | Constrained; requires carrier-grade NAT | Scales natively to well over 5 billion devices |
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