I’ve recently been chatting to a colleague at work about IPv6 in the context of OpenFlow/SDN and the whole “Nice idea but will anyone use it?” and we got onto the numbers around IPv6 which i wanted to post here for peoples amusement curiousity, along with the links i found the aforementioned numbers on incase they are incorrect!

So according to an article on Anphicle.com, “There will be 340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 IPv6 addresses.”

Wow. How do you even articulate that number? Well i’m glad you asked:

340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion, 463 sextillion, 463 quintillion, 374 quadrillion, 607 trillion, 431 billion, 768 million, 211 thousand and 456.

Double wow!

So now we know that there are a huge number of IPv6 addresses, is it likely we are to ever run out? Bearing in mind the paradigm of  “No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer” by Mr Bill Gates, then its not a good idea to sneer and say “of course we wont run out”. What if in the future, we assign IPv6 addresses to everything like we do RFID style, and we then dispose of this rubbish/garbage and dont reclaim them? Will we run out then?

Well according to a post on StackExchange regarding the question “Could we give an IPv6 address to every grain of sand on the planet?”:

Estimating the number of grains of sand on Earth is difficult. This source suggests 7.5×10^18 grains, but only includes beaches (deserts, under-sea sand and other sources not included.) This source suggests 10^20 to 10^24 grains.

The number of addresses IPv6 could possibly address is 2^128 (excluding reserved addresses), or about 3.4×10^38. Even if you include the reserved addresses you’re still left with far more IPs than grains.

In fact, assuming the most number of grains of sand – around 10^24 – 294 femtopercent (yes, femto, 10^-15) would be used if every grain were allocated an IP. You could allocate 340 billion planets with the same number of grains of sand before you even came close to filling up the address space. After all that, you’d still have 2.8×10^35 addresses free.

If we therefore have the ability to allocate 340 billion planets worth of sand an IP address each, i think we are potentially safe despite our disposable-society lifestyles.

Sam

Links: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/4508/can-every-grain-of-sand-be-addressed-in-ipv6

Links 2: http://anphicle.com/en/how-many-ipv6-addresses-can-there-be/