There are also interesting developments in home distribution such as G.hn, 802.11ac and 5GHz radio optimized for HD video delivery. In access technology, VDSL, Fibre and LTE will supplement ADSL/ADSL2+. Aside from IPv6, what do you foresee as being the next major developments in home gateway router design and development? Technicolor is actively engaged with IPv6 World congress and often participating in related discussions on the topic within the “IETF v6ops” working group.ĥ. We’re offering our customers the IPv6 capable consumer equipments for sure a lot of them will be used during the World IPv6 Launch. Does Technicolor have any plans to celebrate or get involved with this event? A mass of major global organizations, websites and businesses have all agreed to enable IPv6 addressing as standard on their servers from the 6th June 2012 (aka – World IPv6 Launch Day). It would have been easier to go natively to IPv6, but unfortunately we cannot change what end users have at home, so we need to keep assuming that there will be IPv4 devices for many years.Ĥ. The main challenge is to keep simultaneously IPv4 and IPv6 stacks. Functionality has been progressively developed over a number of years. IPv6 has been added generically for all our platforms. Did you face any challenges along the way to implementing IPv6 in your platforms? This helps bring new services to market, and provides the certainty of a future-proof approach.ģ. However from a home platform standpoint, now that the standard is well established, it is possible to bring consumer affordable IPv6 products like our MediaAccess platform to market. This creates pressure on the overall IPv6 business case.
One of the reasons that internet providers (ISP) often give for not supporting IPv6 is because of the need to upgrade their entire infrastructure to support it. In your view, why has it taken router manufacturers so long to bring consumer affordable IPv6 products like the TG582n to market especially given how old the standard is?
Crucially one of the reasons that internet providers (ISP) often give for not supporting IPv6 is because they cannot get the needed hardware at an economically viable level. Technicolor recently made news after it became one of the first in the industry to ship a consumer affordable / sub-£40 wireless broadband router (MediaAccess TG582n) with real IPv6 support. However, those who don’t adapt quickly are more likely to encounter future difficulties once IPv6 client devices and applications become more prevalent.Ģ. The situation is less acute in more mature markets like Western Europe, where some ISP’s have retained IPv4 address space and have deferred the issue and some others who are adapting their networks to maximize IPv4 use. Some ISPs are proactively positioning themselves as IPv6 ready, making it one of their key selling points, or simply by fear of not being able to increase their subscriber base through lack of available IP addresses. In your opinion, what will this mean for UK based broadband providers especially those that fail to adapt? Current estimates predict that the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for the UK and Europe (RIPE NCC) will exhaust its last remaining supply of IPv4 internet addresses during 2012. Becoming one of the first to do consumer affordable IPv6 (sold alongside AAISP’s broadband packages) is sure to help their prospects and also makes them an ideal candidate for our interview. Technicolor isn’t exactly a household name in the broadband router market, unless you remember Thomson, but over the past few years they have made significant strides forward. Tomorrow is World IPv6 Launch Day and in anticipation of that event .uk has managed to secure a short interview with Pascal Portelli, a Senior Vice President of global media and technology firm Technicolor, which is perhaps best known for building one of the world’s first truly consumer affordable and IPv6 capable broadband ISP routers ( TG582n).