Mobily, Bayanat, introduce IPv6 in Saudi Arabia

The announcement came in a regular meeting for the working team on Sunday. The meeting was supervised by CITC and Mobily.

Hani Al-Mansour, Mobily's Internet gateway manager, said Mobily is now ready to connect research center and universities to the IPv6 network.

Major companies in the Kingdom have been working on technical plans to move to IPv6 for years. Bayanat has now provided a practical example of how to do it successfully.

Compared to its predecessor, IPv4, the new protocol is a quantum leap. While IPv4 is capable of only 4.29 billion (232) IP addresses, IPv6 is capable of supporting many more, which each IP address comprising 39 digits instead of the customary 12, or 2128 numbers.

According to the latest report by the IPv6 society, IPv4 is about to run out of IP addresses, with only about 11% remaining unused. The report attributed the unused numbers to IP address sharing using network address translation technology (NAT).

Experts say that NAT was responsible for IPv4 remaining in service for so long simply because it does not support some Internet applications, such as IP video calling, as well as websites that do not allow access to computers using a shared IP address. Still, IPv6 is not expected to be fully operational before 2012.