World IPv6 day welcomed by South African stakeholders

[jes]

World IPv6 day welcomed by South African stakeholders

Local operators and telecoms companies punt the value of IPv6 to future proof the Internet

 

[RoganDawes]

World IPv6 day welcomed by South African stakeholders

Local operators and telecoms companies punt the value of IPv6 to future proof the Internet

How about a list of local ISP's that support IPv6 natively?

Now that might start to put pressure on.

I'm amazed to think that Neotel might be the first ISP actually providing end to end IPv6 connectivity!

 

[Xenophyl]

AfriNIC anticipates that it will run out by 2012.

End of days.

 

[midnightcaller]

What does IPv6 mean to desktop users?
Does it mean our ISP will now give the new IP address instead of the current xx.xx.xx.xx format?

 

[Kelerei]

How about a list of local ISP's that support IPv6 natively?

Now that might start to put pressure on.

I'm amazed to think that Neotel might be the first ISP actually providing end to end IPv6 connectivity!

None of them do at the moment - Telkom's IPConnect product (which they have to use to provide ADSL services) does not support IPv6. Bitstream (when Telkom eventually goes live with it) is expected to solve this.

Those that do not offer ADSL are further down the road - I recall a post by Andrew Alston indicating that TENET's core network is fully dual-stack now (although not all of the individual campuses that they connect). Can't seem to find that post though.

What does IPv6 mean to desktop users?
Does it mean our ISP will now give the new IP address instead of the current xx.xx.xx.xx format?

Looking at the ISPs that offer native IPv6 at this time (I specifically looked at Australian and New Zealand ones, since the Asia-Pacific region has the biggest shortage of IPv4 addresses and I therefore expected those guys to be moving ahead with IPv6 fairly quickly), it looks like they'll assign you both ye olde single IPv4 address, and a /56 (example, mileage may vary) of public IPv6 address space.

Provided that your router and operating system are both dual stack (i.e. can support IPv4 and IPv6 concurrently), you will have no problems accessing both the IPv4 and IPv6 internets (IPv6 is not backwards compatible). At this stage, routers are few and far between in this country at least, so I suggest you e-mail your favourite router manufacturer to find out what they can do for you. Operating systems have been dual-stack for a while - Windows first had an experimental IPv6 stack in the Windows 2000 days, matured with the XP service packs, and has become properly usable from Vista onwards. Linux and Mac OS X have had a stable IPv6 stack for even longer. (I believe that the OS will try to use IPv6 first and fall back to IPv4 if it can't.)