This was an April fool, of course :-)
After nearly twenty years of a trial implementation of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) A&A today announces its retirement.
IPv6 was first defined in an RFC in 1995 and A&A first explored offering IPv6 to customers in July 2002, we later made it a standard feature, given to all customers, in January 2011. We were one of the first UK ISPs to offer IPv6 and it is with great regret that we have had to call an end to the project.
The trial provided useful information and proved that a scalable Internet using publicly routable addresses is certainly possible. But ultimately users reported that typing the addresses was just too unfriendly and too unmemorable to be of permanent use, and after all this time even Google reports less than 40% uptake:
Effective immediately all IPv6 routing via Andrew’s & Arnold has been stopped, and A&A suggests increased usage of NAT (network address translation) where IPv4 exhaustion is a risk.
MD Adrian Kennard said, “We gave it our best shot; even designing our own routers that supported IPv6 from scratch. But colons just don’t belong in IP addresses, and we feel there really isn’t any customer demand. We will still offer customers IPv4 at no extra charge and separately we will improve our NAT algorithms to increase IPv4 performance. And eventually, we will give IPv14 a try.”
It was fun whilst it lasted though, wasn't it?
