Australian startup IPv6NOW is aiming to fill the void between the technology promises of next-generation networking and the business benefits by offering commercial support and services around IPv6.

IPv6NOW co-founder and director Tony Hill said there has been a mixed message from the technology community about IPv6, but in the past year was a consensus between the technology and policy communities now that any assignment of a large block of continuous IPs must be in the new protocol.

As an IPv6 service provider for business, IPv6NOW offers tunnel brokerage and wants to go to market with an SLA, not a best effort.

New IPv6NOW customers can get one IPv6 address for free and if they want more can get a 64-bit subnet and part of a reserved 48-bit network.

"We are geared to answer business questions," Hill said, adding the key drivers for IPv6 are the increased address range and its ability to provide a scalable end-to-end architecture.

Hill is keen to demonstrate the potential of any client device, for example a notebook, being able to serve content to any other device either privately or in public.

So far IPv6NOW has delivered a report the Victorian state government on the possible usage cases for IPv6 technology.

Recently, Internode was one of the first ISPs in Australia to offer an IPv6 service, but the equipment most consumers use to access the Internet is not IPv6-enabled. Many SOHO routers aren't even software upgradeable.

IPv6NOW technical consultant Mike Biber said the only native service yet available from Internode is via a direct Ethernet connection, but not DSL. These connections must be tunneled over IPv4.

"APNIC will get its last allocation of IPv4 addresses from the pool in 2010 or 2011 and about a year later it will have exhausted its spare supply and this means no more IPs for Australia," Biber said, adding there is no need for a last minute panic as it is easy to try IPv6.

"Anyone can use our tunnel broker service because it works over any existing IPv4 Internet connection."