Microsoft Pledges Support for IPv6

Announcements by Microsoft and Cisco of support for Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) ensure eventual migration of the Internet to the new standard. Though a complete transition to IPv6 may take five to ten years, endorsement by these industry heavyweights ends years of debate and interim fixes that retrofitted new functionality onto the current Internet Protocol, IPv4. Initial Microsoft support for IPv6 comes in the form of a “technical preview” that enables developers to begin porting applications to the new protocol. Production-quality IPv6 Microsoft code is expected in the first half of 2001, in the next version of Windows 2000 (code-named Whistler). Cisco is supporting IPv6 in the current test version, 12.1.(5)T, of its Internetwork Operating System.

What’s Wrong with IPv4?

IPv4 has been the primary communications protocol for the Internet for more than 20 years. Several inherent design limitations make its continued use in the expanding Internet questionable. The most dramatic of these-limited address space-threatens to restrict expansion of the Internet to new mobile devices such as cell phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs).