It's finally here! IPv7
🚨 BREAKING NEWS! 🚨
Ladies and gentlemen I have some amazing news to share with everyone, after COVID and all the endless drama that the world has been traumatised with finally some great news for all the computer engineers around the world: IPv7 is coming and it’s frigging awesome as it will finally refactor the ham and sausage fisted burning train wreck that was IPv6 (sorry I should have left a trigger warning before uttering that!).
But before I share with you what IPv7 looks like, lets recap what we have today in terms of both IPv4 + IPv6.
We all absolutely love and adore IPv4, I mean there is a lot to love. It’s clean, simple and straight forward, even non technicals can understand it. That’s the power of good design! Dare I say it’s even beautiful.
IPv4 is made up of essentially 32 bits that are represented by 8 bits split into 4 segments split up using a “dot”, the oh so familiar and comforting “IP Address” that we have all come to know and love, here is an example:
192.168.1.0
Of course using 32 bits means that technically we have an address space of 2^32 (sorry I can’t use the “sup” tag because Hugo) which gives us a whopping 4,294,967,296.
But of course back in the 90s before the internet blew up that would have been a huge number, in hindsight it’s not so big after all.
So of course in order to address (hehe note the pun) shortage of address space IPv6 was born, and cutting to the chase to put it bluntly, it’s like a pig that hid inside a corpse of a donkey until its body fused with it and now we have this transmogrified donkey corpse walking pig thing.
For reference look at the grotesque and hideous IPv6 example:
2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334
It’s of course 64 bits, and so at 2^64 we get a huge crazy big number, but that’s beside the point if I can’t explain it to granny damn it!
Behold IPv7
OK enough teasing, are you ready for IPv7? what would have been your natural instinct if you were asked to expand the address space of IPv4? just increase the number of segments right?
Guess what, with IPv7 that’s EXACTLY what it does and it’s 64 bits so 100% backwards compatible with both IPv4 AND IPv6!
Here is an example of the exact same IPv4 address from earlier:
0.0.0.0.192.168.1.0
That’s it! finally I can even explain this to granny: “It’s just like IPv4 but with more numbers!”
I hope you’re all as excited as me, the future may be uncertain but one thing is certain IPv7 is going to be blooming wonderful!
PS This is sacasm and comedy, but god I wish it was true