sgCarMart gets ahead of the pack by upgrading website for IPv6 support

Since the beginning of sgCarMart, in 2004 the humble three man team has progressed to grown to a vibrant and dynamic company with 40 employees. Proof to the progress, the website carries 34.8million page views and over 630,000 unique visitors a month. With increasing amounts of traffic, the largest automotive website (hitwise) in Singapore needed an upgrade.

sgCarMart started migrating to the IPv6 internet protocol standard since September last year while the Asia-Pacific region has been endangered of IPv4 addreses. IT director Tan Jinglun commented the upgrading project took roughly six months and now has the ability to offer existing IPv4 services on the IPv6 network.  By adopting a standard dual-stack migration, the IPv6 hosts and routers can co-exist with the current IPv4 systems thus serving users in either network.

sgCarMart depends primarily on the internet and the move assures the the company to be future proof where services can still be accessible when next generation internet addressing systems becomes widespread. Mr Tan understands the importance of IPv6 as eventually when users have made the switch, the company would already have taken necessary actions and be prepared to continue offering its services.

sgCarMart is still in the midst of the transition and got aware of the importance of IPv6 through IDA's IPv6 Transition Programme. sgCarMart's assistant IT manager, Derrick Lim, admitted it was challenging to familiarise with the long addresses and lack of IPv6 reference industry deployments. Mr Lim also commented he looks up the internet to learn more about the migration issues, and had to ensure existing IPv4 hardware and software can be concurrently operated after IPv6 was introduced.

Local audience’s major support for sgCarMart can be retained over its competitors with the move. The company’s website generates the highest hits among 30 other automotive websites, according to a 2012 Hitwise industry report. The fast depleting IPv4 addresses are scarce and expensive with software giant Microsoft paying US$7.5million for 660,000 addresses from Nortel Networks. Besides saving costs, sgCarMart can tap on business opportunities in Indonesia and other emerging markets, where IPv6 adoption is expected to accelerate.

According to Telecom SudParis, a graduate engineering school in France, emerging commercial superpower China, has the second most number of IPv6 addresses globally second only to tech-crazy Japan. Meanwhile India’s IPv6 allocations have grown by over 120 per cent over the past decade, according to the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC).

Like IPv4 websites, IPv6 websites have also become targets for denial-of-service attacks that flood computers with high volumes of Internet traffic. IPv6 is a relatively new technology where protections from cyber threats are still in the works.

Mr Tan explained how local businesses are not looking at IPv6 right now because most of them are not facing the full impact of an IPv4 address crunch. More companies will only notice when IPv4 is fully depleted and no more IPv4 addresses can be acquired, although experts have agreed besides security costs can also be saved.

For example, the switch to VoIP calls from conventional circuit-switched telephone calls could save enterprises 20 per cent or more on telephony expenditures. Mr Tan also mentioned the information provided by IDA is helpful for companies with little to no knowledge on the migration issues.