The first thing to know is that every computer on the Internet has an IP address. Similar to a phone number, it's how computers are able to find and communicate with each other. Without one of these addresses, a device is unable to talk to any other devices. This includes smartphones, web sites, tablets, home media players, and any other Internet-enabled device.

Back when the Internet was initially designed, sufficient addresses were created to allow for roughly 4.3 billion computers to connect and talk to one another. At the time, this seemed like more than the world would ever possibly need. The tremendous growth of the Internet over the past decade and a half or so has created a shortage of IP addresses. While there are ways to work around the problem, it has become clear that a new way to address computers needs to be implemented. This is where IPv6 comes in.

IPv6 answers this shortage by increasing the number of available addresses from 4.3 billion to 340 trillion trillion trillion (340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). With this comes a few changes, most notably the way the addresses look:

An example IPv4 address (current standard):
66.135.205.14

An example IPv6 address:
2620:0:503:429::feed:bacc

Over time, innovations that take advantage of the improvements of IPv6 could change the way we do lots of ordinary tasks. In the meantime, most people won't notice the difference between the old and the new IP addressing standards.

The good news is: most modern Operating Systems (Windows, MacOS-X, Linux), already support IPv6. This means that in most cases, once your computer is connected to an IPv6 enabled network, it will automatically do the right thing. A number of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are already doing trials of IPv6. Contact yours to find out how to participate. They will assist you in ensuring all of the technical requirements are satisfied for an easy and seamless experience.