After about 10 years of the Internet being in the mainstream of technology I think most people of heard of an IP address and know what one looks like.

An IP address is four groups numbers where each group can range from 0 to 255. The lowest IP address is 0:0:0:0 and the highest is 255:255:255:255.

This means there can be 4,294,967,296 (4.3 billion) unique IP address.
(256 x 256 x 256 x 256 = 4,294,967,296)

This might seem like a lot, but at the rate we are adding new devices and networks we will run out of IP addresses in two to eight years.

To solve this problem a new IP address format has been created called IP version 6 (or IPv6). The current IP address format is actually known as IPv4.

IPv6 looks like eight groups of four digits or letters ranging from 0 to F. This number and letter numbering scheme is known as hexadecimal because there are 16 different characters to use instead of just ten available in the decimal system.

Therefore the lowest IPv6 is

0000: 0000: 0000: 0000: 0000: 0000: 0000: 0000

and the highest IPv6 address is:

FFFF: FFFF: FFFF: FFFF: FFFF: FFFF: FFFF: FFFF

Now for the amazing part: How many more IP addresses does that give us? Well each four character hexadecimal group has 65,536 possible combinations.
(16 x 16 x 16 x 16 = 65,536)

Combine these eight groups together and you get 340 undecillion possible addresses!

That looks like this:

340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

(65,536 x 65,536 x 65,536 x 65,536 x 65,536 x 65,536 x 65,536 x 65,536 = see above)

How big is this number? It is so big that you could assign 430,000,000,000,000,000,000 IP addresses to each square inch of the Earth!

Practically this means everything in your life can have its own unique IP address. Every house, car, cell phone, wristwatch, coffee maker, TV, radio, MP3 player, PC can have their own address. Anything that has anyway to communicate on a network will be able to be uniquely identified. This will make possible some really neat stuff that I cannot even imagine yet.