The Benefits of IPv6

The shift from IPv4 to IPv6 is a welcome one. One of the issues that we face is the dwindling stock of IP addresses, each time we order an internet leased line for our clients we keep our fingers crossed that there will be enough IP addresses for the job. The great news is that new BTnet connections will be delivered IPv6 ready, which means that clients will be able to migrate over to IPv6 at their leisure.

IPv6 should bring a whole host of benefits, including an increase in the number of IP addresses available, let’s take a quick look at these:

Increase in IP Addresses

This is the obvious one and it’s still worth trying to get your head round the theoretical number of IP addresses available. With its 128 bit addressing it means that there will be over 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible addresses. That’s 100 addresses for each and every atom on Earth. Should be just enough then!

Security baked in

IPv6 has IPsec at its heart, this should make IPv6 a much more flexible protocol.

Efficient Multicasting

With IPv6 packets can be sent to numerous addresses with a single operation. This makes the protocol much more efficient – IPv4 specifies each recipient individually which uses more bandwidth and is slightly slower.

Mobile IP Addressing

Another benefit is that IPv6 an IP address should stay the same even when that device is shifting from one network, or node to another. This could mean that we finally achieve the holy grail of mobile voice convergence. In a nutshell this means that your mobile handset becomes your office phone, and could mean that you only have just the one (non-mobile) number. Calls are routed across a private network, the web, or 5G network to wherever you are in the world.