* MCI's first commercial customer for IPv6 services
IPv6, the long-awaited upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol, might be showing signs of life with last week’s announcement of MCI’s first commercial customer for IPv6 services.
Seattle supercomputing giant Cray is the first U.S. company to acknowledge using MCI’s IPv6 overlay service. MCI says it has a handful of other U.S. corporate and government clients for the service, which the top-tier ISP quietly made available in January.
“We’re seeing quite a bit of demand spanning a number of different industries,” says Kevin Gatesman, senior manager of emerging technologies for MCI. “We’ve had a number of customers approach us directly and say: ‘What can you do for me with IPv6?’ These are all big, readily recognized brand names like Cray. They’re all at the leading edge in their industries.”
IPv6 is an upgrade to IPv4. Developed by the IETF, IPv6 is designed to ease administration, tighten security and have an enhancing addressing scheme over IPv4. Despite its promise, IPv6 has failed to catch on in the U.S. Until now, only one ISP – NTT Verio – offered commercial IPv6 service here.
The North American IPv6 Task Force applauded the announcement of MCI’s new service. “It will help the adoption of IPv6 within North America,” says Jim Bound, task force chair and CTO of the IPv6 Forum. “Having ISPs support IPv6 also will help the evolution here to next-generation networks, which will require the enablement of IPv6.”
MCI is offering a free IPv6 overlay service that any customer of its dedicated Internet access services in the U.S., Europe and Asia can use.
“By the end of the year we will offer native IPv6 services to customers with T-1 and T-3 service. They can run IPv4 or IPv6 on that facility,” Gatesman says.
MCI admits that getting native IPv6 service ready requires many systems and services changes.
“It’s a pretty big effort considering the sheer size of our IP service and the size of our backbone,” Gatesman says. “As we do technology refreshes throughout our network, we make sure everything is IPv6-ready.”
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