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Originally Posted by Porsche-O-Phile
How does all this work? Do they add another group (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) to get more combinations or what? Currently the addressing is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx where xxx is a number between 0-255. This should be 255^4 or 4,294,967,296 combinations possible. How do they get more exactly?
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Actual "public" IP addresses can be one address for a company. Behind that is networks of other routed networks that you can't normally see. You and I probably have the same IP address range on our home routers, it's common to have 192.168.0.0 segment which you nat to one public IP at the ISP.
In theory on your home network you could also have 4,294,967,296 addresses as well, all behind one externally facing IP. This is why we're not in a panic about running out of IP's.
IPV6 is a 128 bit address lenght, so 2128 (340 undecillion or 3.4×1038) addresses. so now instead of 255 we have 0000 and every decimal combination of that. But this is all stateless so it's not like typing in IP's anymore.
An article recently said we had six months left on ipv4 after they allocated the last blocks to ISPs recently. However allocated is not in use so it's not likely to be IP address riot in the near future.
The two systems run in parallel BTW, it's not an extension to the existing address block.