340 undecillion!

Have you heard the word undecillion before? You should familiarize yourself with this word. I came across it today because of the error in my 70-640 textbook claiming there are 340 billion unique IPv6 addresses. What an unscrupulous and unforgivable error!!

There are 2^128 IPv6 addresses. Or you could say 3.4×10^38.

But let's not stop there.

2^128 = 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456

Need to say it out loud? Try this...

340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion, 463 sextillion, 463 quintillion, 374 quadrillion, 607 trillion, 431 billion, 768 million, 211 thousand and 456

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Comments

tiersten

ehnde wrote: »

Have you heard the word undecillion before? You should familiarize yourself with this word. I came across it today because of the error in my 70-640 textbook claiming there are 340 billion unique IPv6 addresses. What an unscrupulous and unforgivable error!!

I've never heard of anybody referring to it as only 340 billion. I've seen it referred to in many places as 340 billion billion billion billion addresses though.

Undecillion doesn't actually appear to be in general usage apart from people referring to IPv6 and in word lists. The usage for IPv6 isn't a real one anyway since its just articles about IPv6 trying to explain it to the lay person and nobody would actually refer to it as that in real life anyway. You'd use the power of 2 notation. Its not in the OED either.

xenodamus

I heard it described once as enough addresses to assign every square inch of planet earth over a trillion IPs. (The number seems to vary depending on where you read it)

MAC_Addy

xenodamus wrote: »

I heard it described once as enough addresses to assign every square inch of planet earth over a trillion IPs. (The number seems to vary depending on where you read it)

That's how I've heard it, too.

eMeS

My prediction: 25-30 years and we'll be in danger of running out of addresses.

2035-2040 timeframe....

tiersten

xenodamus wrote: »

I heard it described once as enough addresses to assign every square inch of planet earth over a trillion IPs. (The number seems to vary depending on where you read it)

According to the CIA World Factbook, the planet Earth has a total surface area of ~510,072,000 km^2 which is ~790,613,181,000,000,000 inch^2

128 bits in an IPv6 address which is 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456

Which means each square inch on the planet has ~430,403,103,690,000,000,000 addresses available for it which is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more than 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) so that statement is technically correct...

If you assume that you're not nuts and only subnetting at the 64 boundary then there are 2^64 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 /64 subnets available. I'm not including the reserved portions which knock out quite a bit of the available range but I can't be bothered to go look it up :P

This means every square inch on the planet has ~23 subnets available for it which is a better number than the trillions per inch number...

tomahawkeer

Pretty cool thread. I never went and did the math for it, but thats pretty interesting!