The Planet, NTT America Offer IPv6

Dedicated hosting provider The Planet and telecommunications provider NTT America announced on Monday that The Planet will offer its more than 22,000 customer’s access to IPv6, the next-generation Internet protocol. The companies have started developing the project, and The Planet anticipates announcing availability later this year.

Launched in 2001, IPv6 provides a major enhancement over the existing IPv4. The technology increases address space, offers support for mobile devices and improves the quality of service and data security.

In the press release, The Planet says it is one of the earliest hosting companies to announce its plans for IPv6. By adding NTT America’s IPv6 transit to The Planet network, the Web host says it will be capable of giving hosting customers an efficient, dual-stack approach for using both IPv4 and IPv6 concurrently.

NTT Communications Group has been directly concerned with developing and deploying IPv6 technology since 1996. The company has been providing commercial IPv6 managed services solutions since 2001 with IPv6 transit services, and then in 2005 with the first IPv6 managed firewall solution.

The company’s IPv6 Gateway services are available world-wide and allows enterprises to connect to the world’s only commercial-grade global tier 1 IPv6 backbone, which operates in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.