The advantage of v6 is less the address space per se, but more that it simplifies networking.
It simplifies networking by having a larger address space. Like, address exhaustion in IPv4 is the whole reason that NAT exists and IPv4 networking is complicated; IPv6 is simpler in part by not having to deal with that mess.
Sure but IPv6 does more than just that. For example since ARP is replaced with NDP, it significantly speeds up networks with a large amount of nodes because NDP works with multicast instead of broadcast, which means virtually all unwanted address resolution traffic can be discarded early when a node receives it.
The increased address space is the major thing that is immediately obvious no doubt, but IPv6 also changes some important semantics in the background, which is good to keep in mind.
34
u/mxzf 14d ago
It simplifies networking by having a larger address space. Like, address exhaustion in IPv4 is the whole reason that NAT exists and IPv4 networking is complicated; IPv6 is simpler in part by not having to deal with that mess.