IPv6: an opportunity for emerging countries

Cancun (Mexico), Jun 30 (EFE).- Internet Protocol version 6, known as IPv6, is an opportunity for emerging countries, such as Mexico and the rest of Latin America, to get connected, Latif Ladid, founder and president of the IPv6 Forum said Thursday in the Mexican resort city of Cancun.

To achieve true “digital transformation” many IP addresses are required, noted the specialist in an interview with Efe during the LATAM ICT 2022 Congress, organized by Huawei with support from ITU and GSMA Intelligence.

“The current Internet is working based on an Internet protocol that has been designed back in the sixties and the seventies. So it is still a research protocol. And in the meantime, we have defined a production Internet protocol, which is version six. So that’s why it’s called IPV six,” he said.

Ladid noted that the problem with the IPv4 protocol, the one currently used, is that fewer and fewer IP addresses are available to users and more are required to expand coverage among the population.

Ladid said that the challenge with the arrival of new technologies, such as 5G, is to reduce the deployment time so that it reaches the greatest number of people in less time.

And in this phase, he added, it is important to exchange information between companies that are making a difference in the world with the adoption of IPv6.

“So we are restoring the end-to-end model, which has a lot of benefits, especially adding new functionalities that we could not do before, as we have used what is called network address translation,” he said.

The manager predicted that “a large number of new innovative applications will be possible through the use of the new internet protocol.”

“We saw the biggest case in India, where they only had about 50 million connected to the internet, but now that a new company has started up they have 250 million users using IPv6, because there is not enough address space for India,” he said.

MEXICO CONNECTS

Ladid highlighted the case of the Mexican company Megacable, the first operator in Latin America to join the IPE Alliance and which is having “the same excellent experience by the addition of IPv6.”

Ladid is also president of ETSI ISG IPE, the most authoritative IPv6 industry organization in the sector. He explained that it is the European standard organization that defines many things like 3G, 4G, 5G, and soon 6G. Its IP6 unit is an enhanced innovation working group that defines best practices for operators.

“So whether it’s in the food supply chain or the logistics chain, we see a lot of new applications that are going to be of great benefit to these parts of the world,” he stressed.

Miguel Sol, director of Information Technology at Megacable, said that the company is based on a digital transformation plan and a network transformation plan to provide a better service to end users.

“In the last three years we have been making very, very important investments in the country and in our network in the order of $600 million per year. We are making a technology change based on HFC technology, from fiber technology to the home,” he said.

Sol also boasted about the evolution of network architectures and support and business support systems, which allows them to modernize customer service systems.

“Today our call center agents through this new generation of systems can already detect online the behavior of the equipment that is located in your home, in this way it helps us to measure the quality of the experience that we are providing,” Sol said. EFE

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