[LINK] First commercial Australian IPv6 tunnel broker

[Karl Auer]

WARNING: Commercial announcement follows!
(but I asked Tony first and he said it was OK :-)

IPv6Now has set up the Australia's first commercial IPv6 tunnel broker.
For details see www.ipv6now.com.au.

An IPv6 tunnel lets you get on the IPv6 Internet simply and at very low
cost (all the way down to free). With IPv6, the Internet works the way
it should, not the way years of IPv4 address scarcity have trained us to
believe.

With one of these tunnels up, one of us set up a web server on his
laptop. The laptop was on a home network, behind a NAT router/modem, as
is usual these days. Using Firefox in another city, also at home and
behind a NAT router, we could look at the web pages on this laptop
directly via IPv6. Just like that - no special hardware, no settings to
change, no ports to forward.

We were remarking "how cool is that" to each other, when it occurred to
us that the whole Internet used to be like that. Then it got too big for
IPv4 and NAT was invented. It got millions more people onto the
Internet, but at a cost.

With NAT, most home and even business users are "disenfranchised",
unable to offer content or services without jumping through all sorts of
hoops, like port forwarding through NAT. Not to mention the pain of
organising a static name for a dynamic address or the even greater
difficulty and cost these days of having a static IPv4 address.

What we were doing with that little web server and IPv6 was actually
*how it is supposed to be*. We've all been hobbling around crouched
under the low ceiling of IPv4 for so long that simple end-to-end
transparency looks fascinating and new.

IPv6 means a whole lot more than just the end of address scarcity, of
course. It's just that this was a real eye-opener to me about how much
that scarcity has changed the face of the Internet already - to the
point that even someone like me could be startled by the simple elegance
of a straightforward, end-to-end connection into someone's home network.

Regards, K.

PS: This announcement would have been made a lot earlier, but Link was
discarding my GPG-signed missives and it took a long time to figure
out...

PPS: Disclaimer: See sig.

-- 

IPv6 Now Pty Ltd______ Understanding, Transition, Innovation ______ 
 ACN 126 460 955
 Karl Auer, Director                           kauer at ipv6now.com.au
 www.ipv6now.com.au                     Head office +61 2 6161 6607
 PO Box 152                         Head office fax +61 2 6262 9938
 Civic Square ACT 2608                       Direct +61 2 6495 7160
 Australia

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