Name: What is IPv6? The Essentials You Need to Know
Uploaded: 2025-11-03T03:11:41.000Z
Duration: 3 min 53 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hey, wanna know what's the deal with IPv6 and how it affects your Internet browsing?

Transition words & phrases

Good, because this is exactly what we're tackling today.

IPv6 or Internet Protocol version 6 is the successor to IPv4.

The main goal of both IPv4 and IPv6 is to give devices a way to be identified and located on the Internet, similar to how a name identifies a person.

However, the number of connected devices has grown rapidly and IPv4 is running out of available address.

To address this shortage and Support growing demand, IPv6 was introduced, offering a much larger pool of IP addresses than IPv4.

IPv6 is all about expanding the number of possible IP addresses available for devices online.

So if IPv4 uses 32 bit addresses, IPv6 uses 128 bit addresses for four times the length, allowing for over three hundred and forty undecilia unique addresses.

IPv6 addresses are initially made up of binary as a series of zeros and ones.

And let's be honest, no one's got time to type up that whole chain of digits each time.

This is why IPv6 addresses are usually arranged in eight groups, each containing 16 bits.

These bits are expressed as hexademical digits.

So instead of dealing with an extensive binary code that represents IPv6, you'll most likely have something like this, and

IPv6 addresses can be abbreviated as long as this process follows appropriate rules.

For example, an IPv6 address like this can be shortened to this.

Now, when accessing a device with an IPv6 address via a browser, make sure to enclose the address in brackets to ensure it works properly.

IPv6 addresses come in three unicast, anycast and Multicast, each serving different data.

Transmission needs to enhance network performance, security or scalability.

Unicast is for one to one communication, sending data to a single specific interface.

Anycast uses one to nearest communication, where multiple devices share the same address and the network sends the packet to to the nearest device based on routing distance.

Multicast is for one to many communication, delivering data to all interfaces subscribed to a specific group.

The key difference is that Unicast targets one interface, Anycast targets the nearest of multiple interfaces, and

Multicast targets all subscribe interfaces.

IPv4 and IPv6 will coexist for many years, if not decades.

But transitioning to IPv6 is inevitable in the long run.

So so to make this transition as smooth as better, a few mechanisms have been deployed to deal with dual stack tunneling and translation.

Dual Stack allows networking devices to run on both IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously, enabling communication over either protocol depending on the Network.

Denalink wraps IPv6 packets in IPv4 packets, allowing them to pass through IPv4 networks, and

translation converts packets between IPv4 and IPv6, enabling communication between devices running only on one of the protocols.