Hexadecimal is a 16-digit numbering system, as opposed to binary's 2-digit system and decimal's 10-digit system. So, a hexadecimal representation is used instead, which makes a little bit easier. I can bet you, there are more than thousands of ways you can do this, and perhaps a similar if not greater number of videos on the web, that teaches you to do this as well. Now, let us all exercise our birthright to subnet, and dig deeper into how we go about doing it.

Notice the additional addressing space provided in the IPv6 Source and Destination Address which is now 128bit long (each), compared to 32bits in IPv4:

This will help understand the major structural differences between the two protocols. So, in all, subnetting is necessary in IPv6, but not for the reasons why we did it with IPv4.īefore diving into subnetting IPv6, I'd like to present a diagram which illustrates the differences between the IPv4 & IPv6 header. If you are given a /48 subnet to work with, you will have more than enough spaces to work with i.e. You can force people to follow a certain route, or even go through a specific router, where you can apply security policies.įor network administrators, subnetting increases flexibility in designing networks, route summarisation becomes easy, routing itself becomes efficient and management of networks improves. Subnetting also will give you an element of security. However if you see it logically, you will still need reduce unnecessary network traffic. I might say, subnetting decreases broadcast traffic, but then you can counter it by saying IPv6 doesn’t have broadcast traffic. The question you might ask is, why do we need to do subnetting if IPv6 already caters to the need for an absurd amount of IP addresses? Yes, I would agree to it at first but because IPv6 does make itself and subnetting two very disjoint terms. In retrospect, all I would say, and do take it as a personal opinion, subnetting is one of the easiest things that can be mastered. Subnetting is one of the most talked about, practiced, and supposedly confusing topics encountered by network professionals. In this tutorial, I will be talking about subnetting. By now I sincerely hope, as readers, you all have got a good grasp of what entails this new protocol. We took the journey of looking inside the headers, the structure and purpose of each and every extension headers.

In the previous tutorials, I went through the need for IPv6, and followed it up by drawing out the salient features which overcomes issues with IPv4.

Ipv6 subnet mask table