Advantages of IPv6:
- Exponentially more addresses available - 3.4 x 10 38 addresses available as opposed to about 4 billion in IPv4
- Security better integrated in packets
- More support for wireless features
- Simplifications to packet header to increase processing speed and ease
- Provides support for especially large packets
- Addresses are much more complicated - 8 groups of 4 hexadecimal digits rather than 4 numbers from 0 to 255
- Huge cost to consumers and institutions to replace all networking equipment
- Some difficulty when IPv4 and IPv6 interact
- Slow adoption by countries using most of the IPv4 addresses
- Little support for IPv6 at a consumer level