NTT Communications, a subsidiary of NTT Corporation, said in a statement it has expanded the coverage of its IPv6 offering to include Australia, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan. Outside Asia, the service will also be launched in the U.S. The service has already debuted in Japan, Malaysia and Europe.
The service is aimed at ISPs (Internet service providers), corporate users and research centres who want to get involved in IPv6, touted as the standard for the next generation of the Internet. Today's Internet relies mostly on the IPv4 standard.
The firm's commercial IPv6 service was first introduced in Japan and Malaysia in April last year and subsequently to Europe this February. It provides a leased line connection to a global IPv6 backbone operated NTT communications and Web hosting solutions firm Verio. This backbone was constructed after the company was appointed the custodian for IPv6 Internet addresses in 1999.
Asia has been active in promoting IPv6 and NTT Communications has been one of the staunchest supporters of the effort becoming one of the world's leading providers of the new services.
NTT Europe, an arm of NTT Com, has been active in Europe for the last three years, offering IPv6 trials to hundreds of users, according the company. The firm offers commercial service in London, Amsterdam, Paris, Frankfurt and Madrid which provides an IPv6 connection as well as an IPv6 over IPv4 tunnelling connection, in which IPv6 equipment is connected over existing IPv4 networks.
In Malaysia, telecoms provider Maxis Communications plans to adopt IPv6 for its third generation (3G) mobile services network soon after the launch of 3G at the end of next year.
Maxis is working with NTT to conduct research on a Malaysian IPv6 network and will also provide policy recommendations, and conduct promotional and awareness programmes on IPv6.
"The use of IPv6 would enable us to easily allocate unique addresses to these devices without having to worry about running out," an NTT official was quoted as saying.
Firms such as NTT have lobbied hard for IPv6 by citing the looming shortage of IP addresses--unique identifiers that allow devices to connect to the Internet. Others point to the historical imbalance in the way addresses had been issued, with the U.S. grabbing the lion's share, leaving little for the growing Internet masses of Asia. Asian nations also feel that the current addressing system, a vital part of their national infrastructure, relies to much on U.S.-led technology and administration.
IPv6 is expected to solve these issues by increasing the address space from 32 bits to 128 bits, allowing a much larger number of devices to be simultaneously connected. By conducting their own research, Asian countries can also contrbute intellectual property to IPv6, compared to IPv4, which sprung mostly out of research done by the U.S. military.
However, others feel the problems with IPv4 have been overstated, mostly for commercial and political reasons.
The APNIC (Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre), the authority in charge allocating and registering Internet resources in the region, has since clarified that the doom and gloom surrounding IPv4 is nothing more rumors.
The governments of Japan, Korea and China have already invested significantly in IPv6 technology in recent years. For example, Japan has a government-imposed deadline to upgrade its information technology sectors to run on IPv6 by 2005.
Elsewhere, the U.S. Department of Defense said it will move to IPv6 by 2008. Department acquisitions taking place after October of this year must be IPv6-compatible in order to help the military gear up for the transition.
CNETAsia's John Lui contributed to this report.
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