The Truly Massive Scale of IPv6 Visualized

The number of IPv6 vs. IPv4 addresses can be hard to fathom; IPv4 uses a 32-bit address scheme allowing for a total of 2^32 addresses (just over 4 billion addresses). There are 3.4×10^38 or 340 undecillion IPv6 addresses, however. We help to visualize just how much larger IPv6 is than IPv4.

Some context: our CTO was preparing a presentation on IPv6 for Silicon Valley DevOps Days and looked around for visualizations to show the scale of IPv6 in comparison to IPv4. IPv4 isn’t going anywhere, but the reality is that dual-stack networks are the future. That means IPv4 and IPv6 living in harmony. But how do we get there when IPv4 has ~4.2B IPs and IPv6 brings…more? (340 undecillion – a number followed by 36 zeros). Because we didn’t find any helpful visualizations, we went ahead and made one.

For more context on IPv6 vs. IPv4 and to learn this inspiration for creating this video, check out our blog post: https://www.6connect.com/blog/truly-massive-scale-ipv6-visualized/

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