Staying Ahead of the Pack with IPv6

Singapore's top employment website deploys IPv6 to ensure its services remain accessible when users eventually flip the switch to the latest Internet network protocol system.

Mr Ted Targosz, business development and        operations manager at JobStreet

Driven by the need to future-proof its businesses, JobStreet started deploying its IPv6 network more than six months ago. The pan-Asian job portal serves over 80,000 corporate customers and 10 million jobseekers across Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, India, Japan and Thailand. Therefore, it is important for the company to ensure IPv6 is supported in its services deployed in fast growing economies which may adopt IPv6 relatively earlier. Transitioning to IPv6 enhances JobStreet's ability in reaching out to a broader regional customer set.

 

Ted Targosz, business development and operations manager at JobStreet, said: "As the Internet community deploys IPv6, we will have to be prepared as there will come a point when customers will not be able to use IPv4 networks to access our services. Moving to IPv6 ensures our services will continue to be accessible to users before everyone else - when IPv6 takes off."

In Singapore, JobStreet operates Careers@Gov civil service job portal. "To align with the overall initiative to make Government's online services accessible via IPv6, we're making Careers@Gov accessible through IPv6." Targosz said.

To address the IPv4 address crunch, some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have turned to carrier grade network address translation gateway (CGN) as a stopgap solution. CGN is based on the use of private IPv4 addresses which get translated to a smaller shared pool of public IPv4 addresses. However, this approach creates bottlenecks due to the translation and degrades the user experience.

"We've made the necessary technical assessment and decided that we should prepare for the scenario where ISPs also offer native IPv6 instead of private IPv4 based on CGN. We also believe that any intermediary translation between the user and our services could pose performance issues," Targosz said. JobStreet's strategy is to provide full IP connectivity so that its services can be reached through both IPv4 and IPv6 networks.