2012/02/03

Brainstorming on IPv6 Address Space

I did a bit of googling on the number of times IPv6 address space over IPv4. In simple math, it is :

2^128 divided by 2 ^32 = 2 ^96 which should be 79228162514264337593543950336.

Surprisingly, many websites quote the wrong math calculations like 4 billion times, 40 billion times and 16 trillion times. There are some that say "79 Octillion times the IPv4 address space" which should be correct.

Of course, "79 Octillion times" can not be understood in English and can hardly be translated into Chinese. It seems meaningless to quote how many times IPv6 address space over IPv4. To convey a clear message on huge address space, we can just simply say :

IPv4 can only provide approximately a total of 4 billion addresses while the number of  available addresses of IPv6 is up to 3.403 x 10^38.

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