The Philippines’ Chikka, which founded a global Internet and mobile messaging community in 1999, became one of the first Internet-based companies to support this major transition in Internet history.
It’s the largest version of the Internet yet. The new IPv6 protocol opens 340 trillion, trillion, trillion IP addresses as 4 billion IP addresses originally provisioned by the older version of the Internet (IPv4) fast approaches depletion.
The Philippines’ Chikka, which founded a global Internet and mobile messaging community in 1999, became one of the first Internet-based companies to support this major transition in Internet history, aligning itself with other global players including Yahoo, Google, and Facebook who are enabling IPv6 for their products and services. The transition is led worldwide by the Internet Society.
“IPv6 is crucial to the continued growth of the Internet as a platform for innovation and socio-economic development. The web has been Chikka’s home since the last decade; and we owe it to our millions of users and to future generations of innovators to push the adoption of the largest and most expansive version of the Internet yet,” said Sammy Peralta, Chikka Philippines’ Chief Operating Officer.
As IP addresses become increasingly scarce, homes and industries risk increased costs and limited functionalities for users. An IP address is a sequence of numbers assigned to each Internet-connected device. In recent years, a global explosion in the number of devices and services on the Internet has led to a looming shortage of IP addresses.
For instance, new smartphones that made their appearance not long ago have now reached over one billion; all running communication, productivity, social media and entertainment apps that necessitate connections to the Internet. Various web services including Chikka’s popular free text messenger, are now being used as apps on these smartphones. The company also powers mobile communications, information and entertainment and even payment solutions that invariably run on the Internet.
“By adopting IPv6, we are future-proofing generation after generation of people whose standards of living can be profoundly elevated by the Internet. As it is, we are still in the midst of addressing a so-called ‘digital divide’ among Filipinos. The online class is a privileged class with priority access to information and interaction, who have a higher productivity, and who can influence their socio-economic situation. The IPv6 revolution may be appreciated in this sense,” added Peralta.
He also noted that Chikka users need not be worried about the IPv6 upgrade as it will not interrupt any of its operations and that by 2013, all Chikka products and services will be fully supported in IPv6 networks.
With billions of messages exchanged between online and mobile communities since 2001, Chikka’s flagship Chikka Text Messenger (CTM) is probably the world’s first commercially successful integration of web and mobile utilities. The company has since evolved into an incubator for new technologies and innovation, producing telco-grade platforms and real value-added services for the new digital and mobile generation. Its mission, first stated in 2000, is “to bring together communities, heretofore separated by geographical barriers and differences in technology.”
Chikka is a subsidiary of the Philippines’ largest telecommunications group PLDT-Smart Communications.
