Managed IT Services, Low Voltage Cabling, Security Cameras, Business Telephones, Access Controls

The Internet has been very interesting. From the DOT COM to the DOT COM bust, technology have been changing superfast.  Then come the search engine and ecommerce. Then VOIP, SD WAN, now cloud-based servers, software, services, and software as a service.  We use to judge a company credibility by the nice fancy office that they have, how we stive to be more flexible and productive, while working from home.  We never thought that we would be running into a shortage of IP Address that soon. I guess similar to phone numbers, it’s hard to predict.  Phone numbers have had its’ share of area codes conflict as the metro city grow, they force the smaller cities to give up their area code phone numbers to the larger cities. We used to be able to buy a block of 100 DID’s for $5.00.  Now, some carrier charge $1 per did per months, sometimes even more.  We used to be able to request 13 ip address from ISP. Now, we have to pay for it. On top of that we have to fill out an extra sheet of paper stating why we need it. Ip version 4 days are numbered. Internet Service Provider and network hardware equipment provider have been making a push towards going to IPv6.  As with everything else, people do not like to change. The results are some pushed back. I’ve seen IT professional push back, as it can be costly in time and equipment costs.  So why is it so hard to migrate from Ipv4 to Ipv6?  Human by nature don’t like to change?  We don’t like to be out of our comfort zone? We don’t like to learn new things? Well, that doesn’t matter, it will be just a matter of time that we will be force to move forward with IpV6 whether we like it or not. As with anything else in the IT world.  IPv4 has its’ days.  Now, let’s talk about Ipv4.  Ipv4 is a 32-bit (four-byte) addresses.  Ip v4 can be class A, class B, or Class C address.  It can be private or public address. 10.0.0.0-10.255.255.255 is consider private Class A address. 172.16.0.0-172.31.255.255 is private Class B address. 192.168.0.0-192.168.255.255 is consider a private Class C address. Due to so many numbers of public ip addresses, I will not go into too much details about IPv4 public ip address. So, what does Ipv6 do for us?  In a nutshell, we get a lot of more numbers.  IPv6 uses a 128-bit addresses vs the 32-bit addresses.  Any person that understands binary will tell you, that’s a huge difference and a headache trying to calculate the differences, so I won’t go into details.  IpV4 has about 4.3 billion ip address.  IpV6  number about 3.4 x10 to the 38th power.  Honestly, I have no idea what that means.  Let’s just say the average calculator cannot do the trick and neither can an average human brain.  IpV6 are written in 8 groups of 4 hexadecimals each.  That’s right it’s hexadecimals. 0-9 plus additional of the alphabet a-f for a grand total of 16 characters vs the 10-decimal character.  Here is an example of ip version 4 ip address 192.168.1.1.  Here is an example of ip version 6 ip address 2200:0388:3838:efac:cede:3982:0183:3842.  I’m not really sure if that’s a valid ip address.  It does look much more complicated though.  Thanks to domain naming systems we have no reason to remember those numbers.