The evolution of networking
24 Feb 2010
We’re seeing articles in the media—yes, even in this magazine—about the inevitable rise of IPv6 in a networking environment that’s seeing its current method of IP addressing (IPv4) surge toward depletion. And yet, although IPv6 is cropping up in some outlying experiments and in some products, it’s just not surfacing in a meaningful way. Will this new decade see a true migration to the addressing scheme that many people today see no reason for and just don’t want to mess with? In a word—yes.
According to Windows IT Pro contributing editor John Howie, “IPv6 is indeed inevitable. There are simply too many devices that want to communicate with each other for IPv4 to keep working. The explosion in mobile devices is certainly driving this. Currently, we use a number of technologies, such as NAT and Teredo, to make it all work in IPv4but we can’t escape the fact that the pool of available IPv4 addresses is dwindling very fast. (We’ll likely run out in two or three years.)
More from Windows IT Pro…
