Movistar said it currently has a total of 4 million accesses over IPv6
Spanish mobile operator Movistar, owned by telecom group Telefonica, has completed the deployment of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) in its entire mobile network, claiming to be the first Spanish telco to have this technology available in any location and for all generations of mobile telephony.
In a release, Movistar said it currently has a total of 4 million accesses over IPv6, adding that it expects to reach all fixed broadband accesses with this technology before the end of the year.
IPv6 is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol, the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) with the aim of dealing with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion and was intended to replace IPv4.
“The main benefit of using IPv6 lies in a faster access speed for large providers that already offer their content in IPv6 by eliminating the usual intermediate address translation steps in IPv4. In addition, this protocol simplifies network architectures, allowing for stronger security and greater scalability of applications, which are distributed through microservices in the cloud rather than in large, single blocks,” Movistar said.
The telco also said that users can voluntarily activate or deactivate the IPv6 protocol of their terminals through the configuration menus. In addition, users have the option of knowing if they are accessing the contents with IPv4 or IPv6.
“Currently, the arrival of IPv6 is also accelerating the adoption by companies since IPv6 has greater application options, by allowing services that cannot be provided with IPv4, such as residential IoT mesh networks or the segmentation of corporate networks with SRv6 technology which is already used by some multinational firms,” Movistar added.
Telefónica’s 5G network covered 83% of the Spanish population as of the end of 2022. At that time, the operator said its 5G network provided coverage in 1,719 towns and cities across Spain. The telco also noted that nearly 1,700 towns and cities in Spain are covered by its 700MHz 5G service, which had been activated in February of 2022.
In July 2021, Telefónica had announced its decision to award the contracts to deploy its 5G Standalone radio networks across Spain to Nordic vendors Ericsson and Nokia.
