MCI unveils corporate IPv6 customer

Network World - IPv6, the long-awaited upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol, may be showing signs of life with MCI's announcement today of its first commercial customer for IPv6 services.
Cray Inc., the supercomputing giant in Seattle, is the first U.S. company to say it is using MCI's IPv6 overlay service. MCI says it has a handful of other U.S. corporate and government clients for the service, which the Internet service provider quietly made available in January.
"We're seeing quite a bit of demand spanning a number of different industries," said Kevin Gatesman, senior manager of emerging technologies at MCI. "We've had a number of customers approach us directly and say, 'What can you do for me with IPv6?' These are all big, readily recognized brand names like Cray. They're all at the leading edge in their industries."
IPv6 is an upgrade to IPv4, the Internet's main communications protocol. Developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force, IPv6 promises easier administration, tighter security and an enhanced addressing scheme over IPv4.
Despite its promise, IPv6 has failed to catch on in the U.S. Until now, only one Internet service provider-- NTT Verio -- has offered commercial IPv6 service here.
MCI is offering a free IPv6 overlay service that can be used by any customer of its dedicated Internet access services in the U.S., Europe and Asia. MCI says it will offer native IPv6 services later this year.
"By the end of the year, we will be offering native IPv6 services to customers with T1 and T3 service. They can run IPv4 or IPv6 on that facility," Gatesman said.
MCI admitted that getting native IPv6 service ready requires many changes to its systems and services.
"It's a pretty big effort considering the sheer size of our IP service and the size of our backbone," Gatesman said. "As we do technology refreshes throughout our network, we make sure everything is IPv6-ready."
Gatesman said a U.S. Department of Defense mandate to migrate to IPv6 has caught the attention of network executives in other industries.
"The Defense Department mandate has driven a lot of folks to look at IPv6 seriously," Gatesman said. "Of course, the government contractor types are interested. But we're also seeing interest from other areas like manufacturing, financial services and the wireless industry. We see folks looking at IPv6 for mobility, to put an IP address on every vehicle in a fleet, and for making the battlefield network-aware."
Cray is using MCI's IPv6 service for interoperability testing and development of next-generation software and applications for