BOSTON, MA. and MADRID, SPAIN - November 28th, 2005 - The initiative aims to ensure the availability of quality IPv6 transit for ISPs and organizations across the world, with a special focus in the developing countries. This joint effort will help to increase the awareness and earlier adoption of IPv6 among those ISPs and organizations that, for different reasons, still don't have native IPv6 support from their own upstream providers.
Even when IPv6 is already being deployed commercially since the last two years, this is happening at a different rate in different geographies. In some cases, this is due to the insufficient expertise and/or education regarding the importance of the new protocol, while in other cases is a matter of lack of support from the upstream providers, or a combination of both.
This can be easily resolved by training and supporting engineers, while simultaneously providing a way for those ISPs and organizations to connect either natively or with IPv6 tunnels to the OCCAID (Open Contributors Corporation for Advanced Internet Development) backbone, which currently is already available in North America and Europe, and is being extended to reach the rest of the world.
Those activities are also part of the OCCAID GIPS (Global IPv6 Advancement) program, working to promote IPv6 in North America, Latin America and Caribbean, Africa and Asia Pacific. Visit http://www.occaid.org/initiatives.php?node=gips for further information about the GIPS program.
OCCAID and Consulintel have also agreed to further extend the IPv6 knowledge and information availability by linking OCCAID web site to The IPv6 Portal one, maintained by Consulintel, which today is the major single-stop source of information about IPv6.
James Jun, OCCAID Technical Director, said "Through collaboration between our membership and partners, we are working diligently to bring IPv6 closer to the users of the Internet. These activities include education, training and promoting IPv6 access through our global backbone. Our partnership with Consulintel is based on common values and commitment to the advancement of IPv6, and is integral to the success of this mission. We are very excited by the possibilities that this partnership will help us achieve."
"Thanks to the cooperation with OCCAID we have been able to extend our support to ISPs and organizations in different continents and at the time being especially in Latin America and Caribbean, where we have already connected more than 20 ISPs and organizations in the last three months. A few of them have been possible only because OCCAID was available to provide the IPv6 transit service", indicated Jordi Palet, CTO of Consulintel.
About IPv6
IPv6 is an upgrade to the data networking protocols that power the Internet. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) developed the basic specifications during the 1990s after a competitive design phase used to select the best overall solution. The primary motivation for the design and deployment of IPv6 is to expand the available 'address space' of the Internet, thereby enabling billions of new devices (PDAs, cellular phones, appliances, etc.), new users (countries like China, India, etc.), and new, 'always-on' broadband technologies (xDSL, cable, Ethernet-to-the-home, fibre-to-the-home, PLC, etc.).
While the existing protocol, IPv4, has a 32-bit address space that provides for a theoretical 232 (approximately 4 billion) unique, globally-addressable hosts, IPv6 has a 128-bit address space that can uniquely address 2128 (about 340 undecillion) hosts. In practice, the number of global IPv4 addresses that can be used is far less, due to inefficiencies in their allocation and use. IPv4 simply cannot support an Internet scaling to many billions of globally-connected hosts. Network Address Translation (NAT) has extended IPv4's life in conjunction with private IPv4 addresses. However, NAT complicates application deployment and, more importantly, cannot support new Internet growth areas including those 'always-on' and 'peer-to-peer' services that require connections be established to devices in home networks.
About OCCAID
OCCAID is collaboration between research communities and ISPs, working to deploy next generation network technologies for enrichment of commercial and advanced internet applications. Through OCCAID, ISPs, carriers and researchers work together through partnership to develop and experience leading-edge internet technologies. For more information, please visit http://www.occaid.org.
About Consulintel
Consulintel is a leading company in networking and telecommunications technologies, including integration of systems, consultancy, and maintenance/support services. The IPv6 expertise has been acquired mainly through a number of European Commission R&D funded projects and this support is being returned back to the community by means of non-profit activities, in addition to supporting new IPv6 customers and businesses, including ISPs/Telcos, financial corporations, education and public institutions, among others.
Media Contact:
Chris Johnson
(617) 459-4051
pr [at] occaid.org