Currently there are two types of IP that are publically used being IPv4 and IPv6. IPv6 was created in response to the limited addresses that IPv4 provided due to the way that it was structured. IPv4 was created in 1970, in a time where its inventors would have never thought of the internet as the public network we use today. Using 32bit IPv4 has up to 4 billion unique addresses, this was not enough to address the ever growing demand for devices and does not allow for each device to have it’s own separate IP address. IPv6 uses 128 bits for the address, allowing for trillions of trillions of addresses. Despite this newer and more advance structured IPv6 being far superior to IPv4 many addresses still use IPv4.

How we are still using IPv4 with only a limited amount of address locations you might ask? Simple, by reusing old IP addresses but more importantly by using NAT. NAT stands for Network Address Translation which allows for more than the 4 billion (4^16) addresses that IPv4 is capable of handling. NAT can be easily described as having a public address and a private address, similar to how countries can have provinces and states within them. Many public addresses have private address which allow for endless amounts of address despite this limited architecture.