Understanding IPv6

If you’re wary of switching to IPv6, that’s understandable. Nobody wants to learn a whole new networking system – plus, IPv6’s huge hexadecimal addresses are undeniably intimidating.

But IPv6 is actually a lot simpler than you might suppose. It runs over your existing infrastructure, and effectively operates as a completely independent, parallel network – so unless you’re a professional network engineer, you don’t need to learn about tunnelling or 6to4 gateways or anything like that. You just need to make sure that the devices on your network are all IPv6-aware, and have valid IPv6 addresses. That latter point may require you to tick a box or two on your router’s administration pages, but it’s hardly a major project. You will need support from your ISP, too: you can check your current IPv6-readiness at test-ipv6.com.

With that done, you can more or less forget about IPv6. You normally won’t even know when you’re using it: you will still be able to type in an address such as “google.co.uk”, as you do now, and your local DNS server will direct you to the right site, via the right protocol. You can also continue to use local network names to connect to your home computers and other devices, which means you’ll very rarely need to interact with those lengthy IPv6 addresses.

For the odd occasions when you do, you can take advantage of certain rules that make IPv6 addresses a bit easier to work with. For example, let’s say that your full IPv6 address is “2001:0db8:85a3:000 0:0000:8a2e:0370:7334”. To make things more convenient, where a group of numbers starts with a zero, that zero is conventionally omitted, and if one or more consecutive groups consists entirely of zeroes, they’re replaced by a pair of colons. So your address would be written as 2001:db8:85a3::8a2e:370:7334. All right, it’s still not as memorable or convenient as 192.168.1.1, but it’s certainly an improvement.