Please Whitelist This Site?
I know everyone hates ads. But please understand that I am providing premium content for free that takes hundreds of hours of time to research and write. I don't want to go to a pay-only model like some sites, but when more and more people block ads, I end up working for free. And I have a family to support, just like you. :)
If you like The TCP/IP Guide, please consider the download version. It's priced very economically and you can read all of it in a convenient format without ads.
If you want to use this site for free, I'd be grateful if you could add the site to the whitelist for Adblock. To do so, just open the Adblock menu and select "Disable on tcpipguide.com". Or go to the Tools menu and select "Adblock Plus Preferences...". Then click "Add Filter..." at the bottom, and add this string: "@@||tcpipguide.com^$document". Then just click OK.
Thanks for your understanding!
Sincerely, Charles Kozierok
Author and Publisher, The TCP/IP Guide
The Internet Protocol is the foundation of the TCP/IP protocol suite and the Internet, and thus somewhat comparable to the foundation of a house in terms of its structural importance. Given this, changing IP is somewhat analogous to making a substantial modification to the foundation of your house. Since IP is used to connect together many devices, it is in fact, like changing not just your house, but every house in the world!
How do you change the foundation of a house? Very carefully. The same caution is required with the implementation of IPv6. While to most people IPv6 is something “new”, the reality is that the planning and development of IPv6 has been underway for nearly a full decade, and if we were starting from scratch the protocol would have been ready for action years ago. However, there is a truly enormous installed base of IPv4 hardware and software. This means the folks who develop TCP/IP could not just “flip a switch” and have everyone move over to using IPv6. Instead, a transition from IPv4 to IPv6 had to be planned.