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First published by Ed Price - MSFT (aMicrosof)
When: 22 Aug 2011 5:55 PM
Last revision by Richard Mueller (cMVP, Microsoft Community Contributo)
When: 3 May 2013 5:18 PM
Revisions: 11
Comments: 8

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Internet Protocol Version 6

Introduction
Community Resources
See Also
- Books
Other Languages
- German (de-DE)
- Italian (it-IT)

Introduction

IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) is a version of the Internet Protocol (IP) intended to succeed IPv4, which is the protocol currently used to direct almost all Internet traffic.
IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with this long-anticipated IPv4 address exhaustion and is described in Internet standard document RFC 2460, published in December 1998. Like IPv4, IPv6 is an internet-layer protocol for packet-switched internetworking and provides end-to-end datagram transmission across multiple IP networks. While IPv4 allows 32 bits for an IP address, and therefore has 2^32 (4 294 967 296) possible addresses, IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, for an address space of 2^128 (approximately 3.4 × 10^38) addresses. This expansion allows for many more devices and users on the internet as well as extra flexibility in allocating addresses and efficiency for routing traffic. It also eliminates the primary need for network address translation (NAT), which gained widespread deployment as an effort to alleviate IPv4 address exhaustion.