Basic Information on IPv4 and IPv6

IPv4 is running out of IP addresses there are more things using IP address then before. More people have computers, network printers, wireless devices that require an IP. The internet is growing and each Domain name needs an IP address. With IPv4 there are five IP groups, Class A, Class B, Class C, Class D, and Class E. 

Class	Address Range	Supports
Class A	1.0.0.0    to 126.255.255.255	16 million hosts on each of 127 networks
Class B	128.1.0.1    to 191.255.255.254	65,000 hosts on each of 16,000 networks.
Class C	192.0.1.1    to 223.255.254.254	254 hosts on each of 2 million networks
Class D	224.0.0.0    to 239.255.255.255	This is reserved for multicast groups
Class E	240.0.0.0    to 254.255.255.254	This is reserved for research and development

IPv4 only uses 28 bits but with IPv6 it uses 128 bits.The differences between IPv6 and IPv4 are in five major areas: addressing and routing, security, network address translation, administrative workload, and support for mobile devices. IPv6 also includes an important feature: a set of possible migration and transition plans from IPv4. IPv4 has 4,294,967,296 IP addresses and IPv6 has about 340,282,366,920,938,463,374,607,431,768,211,456. IPv6 is a classless scheme. Classless means that you do not have to include the subnet mask. IPv6 is structured with the first 64 bits are used for network identification and the last 64 bits are for the host identification.

http://www.ipv6vsipv4.com/

http://www.xibl.com/general-articles/ipv4-vs-ipv6/

http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/i/ip.htm

http://www.bing.com/search?q=ipv4+vs+ipv6&src=IE-SearchBox&first=21&FORM=PERE1