Twenty years ago, the 4 billion addresses available with Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) seemed such a vast amount for the handful of Internet users that giving out big chunks of Internet addresses didn't cause much concern. As a result, some countries and organizations got tons of addresses, while those who came late to the party had to fight over the remains. Today, the overwhelming global popularity of the Internet, plus the dawning of an era of smart devices, has made 4 billion addresses seem pitifully small. So a group of scientists got together and decided to fix things. Since the early 1990s, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been seeking proposals and designs for a next-generation Internet Protocol (IP) that will offer virtually unlimited address space, as well as provide solutions for mobility and security.
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