First Affordable IPv6 Router Begins To Be Available In The UK

IPv6 routers have existed for some time now, but there are currently very few models available. These are also very expensive at over £100 / $156 approx. However, the Technicolor TG582n router promises to be the first home router that's affordably priced and suitable for the home market. It's not quite on general sale yet, but is being provided as a "free with the service" router from business and techy-oriented Andrews & Arnold ISP - www.aaisp.net - preconfigured to work with their service straight out of the box. AAISP Director, Adrian Kennard had this to say about the new router:

Technicolor: (TG582n). Well, what can I say? They sent an engineer to our offices, by which I mean someone that can read packet dumps on the router correctly and understand them! We spent a day with him checking out their test code and making some tweaks our end as well and we got it working. They have one of our lines in their offices and have been testing.

They have been working with us and proving new code as we find issues. We have customers testing these routers and are now shipping the IPv6 software. The routers are small, they have wifi, and cheap enough to be our standard "free with the service" router.

So, Technicolor it is - our new standard IPv6 router and it even has WiFi. Given that RIPE expect to run out or IPv4s next year UK ISPs need to get their act together and start making IPv6 standard. A sensibly priced consumer DSL router with IPv6 as standard will help a lot. Well done Technicolor.

The sooner that countries migrate to IPv6 the better, because when IPv4 addresses run out, the internet will stop. Not really. It will mean however, that no new devices can come online without going through Network Address Translation (NAT) which has its own performance issues and caveats.

IPv4 depletion can be monitored at: ipv4depletion.com