giganews blog

Corporate culture, personal experiences, and unique observations about Giganews, Usenet, Newsgroups, and Usenet related technologies.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Testing IPv6 Usenet at NANOG

Giganews recently hosted the latest meeting of NANOG (North American Network Operators’ Group) in Austin, TX. At Giganews, we’re always looking to stay on the leading edge of Usenet service, so we viewed NANOG as the perfect opportunity to demonstrate our ongoing efforts to provide service to IPv6 networks. During the conference, NANOG48 attendees from all over the world received free access to Giganews’ service via IPv6.

IPv6 is the next generation of the Internet Protocol (IP) and allows for an almost limitless supply of IP addresses. Unfortunately the current IPv4 address space is limited to roughly 4 billion addresses, and it is projected to be exhausted in less than two years.

Several US Internet providers (e.g. Comcast) have recently announced plans to move their customers to IPv6 backbones. In Europe, IPv6 deployment is progressing more quickly. By providing native IPv6 service, Giganews customers with IPv6 addresses may access Usenet without their traffic going through IPv6-to-IPv4 translation equipment, which can fail or become a bandwidth chokepoint. With our early adoption of the technology, we can continue providing the premium quality service that our customers depend on us for!

NANOG48 Sponsored by Giganews

NANOG48 is now over, but we’re continuing our efforts to provide our premium Usenet service to native IPv6 networks. Although the service provided to NANOG48 attendees was only a demonstration, it substantiated the core of our IPv6 upgrades. Within the next year, we anticipate providing full retail service via IPv6 to all of our customers.
As Giganews’ IPv6 upgrades near completion, we’ll be sending out announcements to customers. Keep your eyes out for these and other service improvement e-mails in 2010!

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