Lixxus announce IPv6 consultation service
IPv6 transit, what’s the fuss?
Maybe for some the question should be what is IPv6! Well, to keep it simple, I’m sure everyone who’s of a certain age can remember the telephone numbers around Britain changing back in 1990. Unless you were a bricklayer from Bermondsey, businesses all over the country updated their van signage, headed paper, business cards, shop fronts and anything basically which had a phone with the old code. Then, with some degree of outrage within the business community at least, in the mid and then again in the late 90’s we had to do it all again, twice!
Well for those of us who do not spend our weekends with our heads stuck inside a router, stripping down an X-Box to see if it can be used for time travel or reading this months copy of geek and geek conversions; IPv6 is the latest version of the Internet’s “telephone” or IP numbering system.
Why change?
It’s simple, history is repeating itself, new technology old problem. The current range, aptly known as IPv4, is running out of numbers.
At the recent RIPE (IP address Naming Authority for Europe) conference, RIPE announced that they believed that the current IP range – IPv4 will be completely depleted within 2 to 4 years.
IPv6 isn’t just about new numbers. The new system comes with in-built security, quality of service, efficiency of working practices, reduced deployment costs and a host of options which the old system wasn’t up to. In fact the idea for the future is to give every device on a network or home connection, for instance the I-touch, it’s own IP address. No more DHCP and convoluted networking.
Lixxus have spent the last 6 months planning all the necessary changes to their network to deliver a new range of services for 2008 and as a small part of those changes, enable IPv6 alongside the current system (IPv4). Lixxus have also teamed up with various vendors of transit services to provide an end to end solution, available now. For others, certainly those with legacy networks and older technology, the change to version 6 may not be so simple. This is why Lixxus say it's imperative that companies start planning now.
Pia Gerhardt, Chief Network Engineer at Lixxus said:
"It's been a long time since IPv6 appeared, in fact it's over a decade ago. Many changes have been made during that time in the networking world up to the necessary changes in DNS functionality which will be completed today. Back then the technology was widely unknown, but in this day and age it rather amazes me that so many ISPs and Enterprises have not as yet deployed IPv6 in their networks. Lixxus prides itself on having a non-legacy network. In fact Lixxus made all the necessary changes in one weekend, with no customer impact. So it can be simple if the correct, hardware, software, planning and expertise is in place before you make the changes."
To compliment this, Lixxus have also invested in training a team of specialists to provide companies with a free IPv6 consultation service.
Lixxus offers a range of products such as Dual Stack transit, as well as plain IPv6 transit, pppv6 and ipv6 MPLS & VPNs.
These services are already becoming popular within the public sector, especially amongst companies where future proofing is seen as a crucial element of the business planning process.
If you would like to find out more about Ipv6 or to arrange a free consultation, to find out more click here.
And finally, if you’re worried that the new range will run out of numbers, the system has so many number options we would need a whole magazine’s worth of paper just to write down the number of permutations. However, we have it on good authority that it’s about 5X1028 for every person on the planet. That’s a lot of I-touch’s.
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