In IPv6 address notation, each address is made up of 128 bits, divided into 8 groups of 16 bits each. Each of these groups is commonly represented in hexadecimal form, and by convention, these groups are called “hextets” although technically they would be more precise as “octets” because there are 8 groups.
However, the term “hextet” is used to describe each group of four hexadecimal digits, which is different from how the terms are used in the context of bytes or octets in other areas of networking technology.
To clarify your question, an IPv6 address is not limited to having “4 hextets”, but must have 8 hextets in total. These hextets can include zeros, and IPv6 notation allows some flexibilities to simplify writing:
- Suppression of leading zeros: In each hextet, leading zeros can be omitted. For example,
0ABC
can be written simply asABC
. - Contraction of consecutive zeros: IPv6 notation allows a sequence of two or more consecutive hextets containing only zeros to be collapsed once, using a double colon (
::
). This can be used to simplify long addresses with many zeros. For example, the address2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:ff00:0042:8329
can be abbreviated as2001:db8::ff00:42:8329
.
It is essential that a full IPv6 address represents all 128 bits, equivalent to 8 hextets, but the use of shorthand notation allows the presentation of these addresses to be more compact and manageable.
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