Deploy360 27 August 2012

Video: IPv6 addressing and why ISPs give out such huge blocks of IPv6 addresses

By Dan YorkDirector, Internet Technology

What are all the numbers, letters and slashes about in an IPv6 address? Why do ISPs give out such huge allocations of IPv6 addresses just for a home network? Couldn’t we use smaller address blocks? Are we setting ourselves up for future issues? Or does this all make sense?

By way of our friends at Team ARIN we learned of an amusing video produced last year by the folks at Softlayer to answer these precise questions for their customers about IPv6. In the video, Kevin Hazard and “Phil” take you through a Prezi animation that explains exactly how big IPv6 addresses really are, how they are structured and how they are given out. In their companion blog post, they explain the motivation for the video and a bit more information.

The video is about 15 minutes long and in that time gives a quite solid understanding of IPv6 addressing. Kudos to the Softlayer team for making the video available!

Disclaimer: Viewpoints expressed in this post are those of the author and may or may not reflect official Internet Society positions.

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