Microsoft Cancels Plans to Move Its Internal Wireless Network to IPv6-Only

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Microsoft Cancels Plans to Move Its Internal Wireless Network to IPv6-Only

By CircleID Reporter
September 18, 2018, 8:47 pm PDT Views: 12,838 Add Comment

Microsoft has digressed from a previously announced plan to move its internal wireless guest network to IPv6-only. Veronika McKillop, Network Architect at Microsoft, in a post on Monday says: “Unfortunately, we had to stop this work because we came across something that the previous internal testing had not uncovered—a team member attended a conference where Internet access was provided as IPv6-only and 99% of attendees could not get their VPN clients to connect on this network. VPN failing on IPv6-only networks (through NAT64) is, as we then found out, well documented in RFC 7269. This finding made it clear that visitors to Microsoft offices who rely on the Guest network would be heavily impacted unless their VPN gateways were IPv6-enabled.”

Bottom line: The network part is easy, barring software bugs, applications are the big unknown, says McKillop. “Not just our own but the third-party applications that often claim ‘IPv6 compatible’ however when it comes to a real deployment, the experience is quite different.”

By CircleID Reporter

CircleID’s internal staff reporting on news tips and developing stories. Do you have information the professional Internet community should be aware of? Contact us.

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