You probably didnt notice, but yesterday the internet got a few trillion times larger. At 00:01 GMT on Wednesday 6 June, some of the worlds biggest web and technology companies – including Google, Facebook, and Cisco – switched over to IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6), a standard which opens up the number of available IP addresses to 2¹²⁸ (thats 340 trillion trillion trillion).

As the number of internet-enabled devices – including smartphones, Tablets, and connected M2M devices – increases, the number of addresses needs to grow in order to make space. Google chief internet evangelist Vint Cerf, one of the pioneering fathers of the internet, wrote a blog post explaining what the move means for the future of connected devices.

“There are already 5.5bn mobiles in the world,” says Cerf. “If they all had internet addressed it would exhaust instantly the IPv4 address space, which is only 4.4bn addresses.”

You can watch Googles video on the IPv6 move below.