Re: IPv6 isn't a very good solution?
It's not really that 'different' though. Fundamentally it is a few more digits. Actually quite a few - 96.
For better human recognition, the expanded address range is usually represented in hex rather than decimal, but IPv4 addresses can be shown in hex and vice versa.
Given that network stacks need to be rewritten to accommodate this expanded address range (eg allocating more RAM for addressing and thus packet headers...), it's useful to change the display convention so people can differentiate between legacy and updated versions.
Given that that's all happening, you may as well add the other extra features that IPv6 provides.
Change the thinking around... another option would've been to make each byte bigger - say 10 bits, which would increase the address space 256-fold (IPv4 address being 4 bytes this would be going from 32 bits to 40 bits). How simple would that solution be???
Biting the hand that feeds IT
