Microsoft’s Windows 8 Blog talks IPv6

An interesting post on the Building Windows 8 Blog about the future of networking and IPv6. As many of you will be aware we are running out of IPv4 addresses and we are going to have to transition to IPv6 which provides many more addresses. In the blog post Microsoft talk about what Microsoft are doing to help smooth transition in Windows clients and servers.

If your interested in networking it well worth reading the post.

IPv6 is the future

Microsoft, along with other technology companies, has been working on the deployment of IPv6 to ensure that end-users continue to have high-quality Internet access, despite the performance and connectivity limitations brought about by IPv4 address exhaustion.

The most immediate benefit of IPv6 is that it provides more than 3×10³⁸ IP addresses, enough for every person to have billions of addresses all to themselves, or enough to give every atom in the universe a unique address. This will allow the Internet to grow and evolve. IPv6 also provides for many security and performance improvements, like built-in support for IPsec. (What happened to IPv5, you ask? Bing can help you find out why it’s being “skipped.”)

Upgrading the entire Internet to IPv6 isn’t something that can be done instantly. It has taken many years to get to where we are today, and we still have many years of work to do. Currently, around 1% of devices can connect to the Internet using only IPv6.