You don’t have to be especially tech-savvy to know that the internet is switching to a new standard called IPv6. News that the current protocol, IPv4, is coming to an end has been circulating for some time, even occasionally popping up in the mainstream media.

What is more of a mystery is why exactly this is happening and what it all means.

In a nutshell, the U.S. Department of Defense, some 35 years ago, decided to introduce a standard that would allow a little more than 4 billion network addresses to connect to the internet. The standard, known as IPv4, uses 32-bit addresses and is basically a means to identify each device that connects the internet. Web-enabled machines are given identifiers that are most commonly written in dot-decimal notation (127.0.0.1, for example). Read more