However, there are rules that must be followed to perform the compression correctly and still point to the correct address. To make this new protocol easier to use, it’s helpful to compress the address into something a little more manageable. In its natural state, an IPv6 address uses eight fields that are separated by colons, and within each of those eight fields is 16 bits. Of course, it follows that IPv6 addresses will be much longer than their predecessors, due to all of those extra bits.
This vast expansion in capacity is due to the use of 128-bit addresses in IPv6 as opposed to just 32-bit addresses in IPv4. As the world was quickly running out of IP address options due to the proliferation of digital devices, it became important to upgrade to IPv6 to open up trillions of more potential IP addresses. For years, the internet and the devices that connect to it have steadily been working toward IPv6 from the previous version of the internet protocol, IPv4.
