Telstra has announced that it will offer Internet Protocol version six (IPv6) connectivity to its government, enterprise and wholesale customers.

 

IPV6 is a next generation of internet addresses, offering, longer IP addresses to overcome the impending shortage of current IPv4 addresses globally.

Telstra’s internet backbone is dual-stacked and this means that its enterprise, government and wholesale Internet customers can be connected with either IPv4 or IPv6.

If customers choose to opt-in to IPv6, they will have access to the global IPv6 internet, including connectivity to multiple providers internationally.

Telstra director transport and routing, Mr David Robertson said the deployment of IPv6 in the Telstra network, being dual stacked gives customers the current reliability of IPv4 as they commence the transition to IPv6.

“Currently IPv4 offers 32 bits for an internet address, with IPv6 an internet address has 128 bits,” he said.

“This means that with IPv4 there were about four billion internet addresses, with IPv6 there are more internet addresses than grains of sand on the planet.

While four billion sounds like a lot of internet addresses, globally we expect to run out of these in the next few years. In many ways this is like when we went from nine digit telephone numbers to 10 digit telephone numbers in the early 1990s, with IPv6 we’re expanding the available number of addresses.”

He said Telstra has a long term for deploying IPv6 capability into our networks, and are pleased that the first of many access options are now available for our customers to commence their transition to IPv6.

“The deployment of IPv6 into the network is an on-going program of work, and we’ll make this available for other networks such as DSL and our wireless networks over time,” he said.

“By dual stacking IPv4 and IPv6 in our network, customers can opt into IPv6 in their own time, and according to the lifecycle upgrade of their existing equipment. Most customers won’t notice the change to IPv6 as we will make this as seamless as possible to our customers,” said Mr Robertson.

Telstra will be working with individual customers who have expressed an interest in moving to IPv6 to help them through that transition.

“In coming years we expect that IPv6 will become the norm and customers will need to opt-out if they wish to use IPv4,” he said.

“However in the early phases of the transition, we’ll be working directly with customers to support them as they make this change.”