ARCEP is heading towards an IPv6 France

Article – French language / Langue Française

L’ARCEP propose un plan d’action pour migrer vers l’IPv6 | Freenews.fr

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Freebox Révolution - courtesy Iliad.fr

The Freebox Révolution – the sign of an advanced Internet in France

France is intending to take bigger strides towards an IPv6 Internet.

Here, the ARCEP who is the country’s telecoms authority are expediting this process through a series of steps.

Firstly, they will be moving the government’s public-facing Web sites towards IPv6 operation. Most likely, this will be a dual-stack affair to allow legacy networks to touch these sites.

Then they will run a public-awareness and education campaign about IPv6 including identifying obstacles associated with not moving towards this newer set of Internet protocols. Two main obstacles in this case would be computers running operating systems that don’t have IPv6 dual-stack operation, and routers that don’t provide for IPv6 operation. This may not be an issue with the latest “n-boxes” that each of the French ISPs are offering to their customers like the Freebox Révolution.

IPv6 logo courtesy of World IPv6 Launch programThe next stage would be to facilitate moving towards IPv6 by having it work across all of the providers competing with each other in that country.

Users will also benefit from improved information especially about maintaining the IPv4 equipment and networks. This is more so with maintaining the legacy IPv4 addresses, but the endpoint issue could be resolved with various routing or tunnelling setups that IPv6 offers.

Last but not least, the French Internet backbone will move off IPv4 towards IPv6, probably only allowing IPv4 “at the edge”.

But some, if not most, of the ISPs serving the French market, especially Free, may be stepping forward towards IPv6 as part of the competitive marketplace. This includes releasing “n-box” routers that have support for this technology or adding this level of support to some existing equipment through a firmware update. Let’s not forget that most operating systems for regular and mobile computing devices will provide for IPv6 in a dual-stack form. Here, it is underscoring that France has been identified one of the first countries to head towards IPv6 technology.

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