Helping people with computers... one answer at a time. TCP/IP
currently has a limit of 4 billion IP addresses, and that's not
enough. IPv6 blows away this limitation. I have a new notebook
with Windows Vista Home Premium installed. I noticed when I view
Network Properties, I see that Internet Protocol Version 6
(TCP/IP v6) has been selected as well as TCP/IP v4. What is
TCP/IP v6? Do I need it to search the web? You don't need it
yet, but someday you will. How soon? Good question. Because 4
billion isn't a big enough number. IP, or "Internet Protocol",
is best recognized by the way it assigns "IP addresses" to
devices on the internet. An IP version 4 address, the current
common technology, is a 32 bit number, represented by 4 numbers
separated by periods. 184.108.40.206 is an example of an IP
address (this one, assigned to the domain microsoft.com). A 32
bit number can represent up to 4 billion different IP addresses.
In reality the number is somewhat less, since some numbers and
digits have reserved meanings