Sify is one of the first companies in India to migrate to IPv6 in May, 2009.

VSNL, Bits Pilani, ERNET and BSNL are already IPv6-ready and major government organizations such as TRAI are striving to make India IPv6 ready before we run out of IPv4 addresses.

Source: APNIC

Although, APNIC finds a steady growth in IPV6 allocations in India, Luthria believes that a large part of the market is yet to begin considering IPv6 as an option. So what is stopping it from doing so?

Impediments in IPv6 adoption
Although people are aware that IPv4 won't last for another one year and that the pool has thinned down to less than eight percent, there is still a gripping hesitation among enterprises to migrate to Ipv6.

"There is a significant cost involved in upgrading to IPv6 and to justify this expense there should be a prevalent need in the market or a cost justification strong enough for them to be willing to make that investment," avers Luthria.

Lutharia adds that a major reason behind the slow adoption could be that most of the benefits associated with IPv6 are only speculative and will be realized much later in the future.

No just this, but the lack of awareness and the comfort zone with IPv4 functionalities are also holding back several from migrating to IPv6.

"Two of the largest reasons are the lack of demand from the end user and the comfort with the network address translation (NAT). System administrators and companies are happy with the control and restrictions they can apply through NAT and are not necessarily willing to give that up," adds Lutharia.

This said, one of the major reasons behind less IPv6 traction is the apprehension over interoperablity. Enterprises are apprehensive of losing business in case IPv6 fails to support IPv4.

"The interoperability issue is also one of the main factors that have deterred the adoption of IPv6. The inability of IPv6 to support IPv4 has lead to the creation of work-arounds such as tunneling. These mechanisms allow providers to support IPv6 and still offer IPv4 to customers while they wait for the mass market to catch up on IPv6. Indian will be lagging behind in this technology, if immediate steps are not taken," Lutharia avers.