IPv6 and the Future of Podcasting
The majority of podcasts are hosted on IPv4-only networks as of March 2021. This has a negative impact on content availability, especially in emerging markets that lead the world in IPv6 adoption.
About IPv6
Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) was introduced 26 years ago in 1995 as a replacement for IPv4. IPv6 was primarily designed to solve the impending exhaustion of the 4.3 billion total IPv4 addresses. For context, the world population in 2021 is 7.9 billion. Clearly not every person, let alone every device, would or could have their own IPv4 address. With IPv6, there are a total of 3.4×10³⁸ addresses which by some calculations should be enough for 69,683 years.