There’s a serious “Geek alert” on this article. If you don’t know what IPv4 or IPv6 is then I suggest you look away and read the next article.. For those who are still reading, IPv6 address have been implemented on almost half of the root servers which means that IPv6 systems can communicate with each other without any legacy IPv4 stuff being used.

Why do we care? Well the number of IP addresses that are currently allocated on the internet is going to hit a very real limit in about 3 years time. This is because the pool of IP addresses available within IPv4 is nearly all used up. Of course back when the IPv4 standard was drawn up in the 70’s, it was never thought that there would be a need to address more than 4 billion computers on the internet. Thankfully with the IPv6 standard, which has had a real push for implementation, that upper limit of IP addresses goes up by a factor of 4 – a number roughly equivalent to 3 followed by 38 zeroes. Hopefully this will be enough for another 30 years! [SHOW ME]