So I was experiencing a repeating “No Internet Access” problem whenever I connected to my mobile WiFi hotspot. After some investigation I realized that it was because I had disabled IPv6 on my Windows 11 PC for the WiFi network interface. The WiFi hotspot was configured to use IPv6 and this is why there was incompatibility between the two devices.
As time passes, more and more devices and networks are going to switch over to the IPv6 protocol there is going to be a problem trying to use IPv4 only devices. It is only a matter of time when some or all of the networking organizations completely give up on the old IPv4 protocol in favor of the new IPv6. This is why it better to enable IPv6 (in addition to IPv4 if possible) on all of your devices.
We can enable IPv6 for any network adapter on Windows 11:
- Press Win+R to open the Run dialog. In the Run dialog, type control ncpa.cpl and press Enter.
- Right-click on the network adapter that you are going to use and then select Properties from there.
- In the adapter properties, you have to select “Internet Protocol Version 6” from the list of available protocols and then click on the OK button.
After saving the new settings for the network adapter, we can reconnect our Windows PC to the WiFi network. This time, it is going to get both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses. You can verify this by running the ipconfig /all command inside any command prompt. The command should display all the configuration details for all the network interfaces on your Windows PC. If you feel confused going through this overwhelmingly large information on your screen, then you can use the findstr to display only the IPv6 addresses by giving the command ipconfig /all | findstr “IPv6”.