Introduction

As we all know, the usage of the Internet has been growing by leaps and bounds especially over the past few years. Information transfer is all important now, with more and more people hopping onboard the World Wide Web and an enormous number of gadgets also becoming Internet enabled.

The Internet Protocol (IP) is the method (in technology, we call it "protocol") by which data is transmitted from one computer to another on the Internet. So every computer has a unique address (in computer world, this is called the IP address) and data is sent in packets of information from the sender's IP address to the receiver's, traversing many other points along the way.

What is Windows IPV6

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the next-generation Internet Layer protocol for packet-switched internetworks and the Internet. IPv4 is currently[update] the dominant Internet Protocol version, and was the first to receive widespread use. In December 1998, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) designated IPv6 as the successor to version 4 by the publication of a Standards Track specification, RFC 2460.

In December 2008, despite celebrating its 10th anniversary as a Standards Track protocol, IPv6 was only in its infancy in terms of general worldwide deployment. A recent study[1] by Google indicates that penetration is still less than one percent of Internet traffic in any country. The leaders are Russia (0.76%), France (0.65%), Ukraine (0.64%), Norway (0.49%), and the United States (0.45%). Although Asia leads in terms of absolute deployment numbers, the relative penetration is smaller (e.g., China: 0.24%). IPv6 is implemented on all major operating systems in use in commercial, business, and home consumer environments. According to the study, Mac OS X leads in IPv6 penetration of 2.44%, followed by Linux (0.93%) and Windows Vista (0.32%).

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Why Windows-IPV6

IPv6 addresses the main problem of IPv4, that is, the exhaustion of addresses to connect computers or host in a packet-switched network. IPv6 has a very large address space and consists of 128 bits as compared to 32 bits in IPv4.

Therefore, it is now possible to support 2^128 unique IP addresses, a substantial increase in number of computers that can be addressed with the help of IPv6 addressing scheme.

In addition, this addressing scheme will also eliminate the need of NAT (network address translation) that causes several networking problems (such as hiding multiple hosts behind pool of IP addresses) in end-to-end nature of the Internet.