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ICANN to focus on IPv6 adoption

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CIOL Bureau
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NEW DELHI, INDIA: Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will be laying stress on IPv6 adoption in India.

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The organisation is aiming at making India its hub for South Asian operations with a local presence.

Talking to CyberMedia News here, Dr Paul Twomey, president and CEO of ICANN, said that the focus for the organisation was in establishing India as a hub in South Asia.

“We are looking at establishing a local presence in India in the next three months. We are a lien organisation and thus will be concentrating on the mobility of our workforce, as we are a bottom-up organisation,” he said.

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Dr Twomey said that once the local presence is established, ICANN will be getting the Government of India and other stake holders such as consumer groups involved to understand the complaints, which arise from this part of the world.

“Some of the issues, which we will be stressing with the Indian Government issues pertaining to IP-address, especially adoption of IPV6 standards; domains and online security,” he stated.

ICANN will also be stressing on IPv6 adoption in the near future, as against the existing IPv4. “We will stress for a national plan for IPv6. We see that people are hesitant to migrate as the current version is embedded in the software as against the earlier one – IPv4 which was in a chip. In the case of a national policy framework in place, hardware manufacturers will be forces to embed IPv6 compliant systems,” he added.

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Meanwhile, Dr Gulshan Rai, director, CERT-In, said that the department of information technology had already initiated steps towards IPv6 readiness among the network and service providers and related IT industry experts, technologists and users.

 
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“As part of demonstrating the IPv6 implementation benefits, the Education Research Network (ERNET) backbone connecting premier academia has been upgraded to IPv6. Applications such as Mail Relay, Domain Name Server have been installed and trial run of applications on Email and Multicasting on IPv6 has been carried out. The ERNET network and a project for examining IPv6 mobility, security and Quality of Service as well as interoperability aspects are underway,” he added.

IPv6, a short form for ‘Internet Protocol Version 6,” is the ‘next generation’ protocol designed by the IETF to replace the current version Internet Protocol IP Version 4. Most of today’s Internet uses IPv4, which is now over two-decades old. Though it has been resilient in spite of its age, it is beginning to have problems.

Most importantly, there is also a growing shortage of IPv4 addresses, which are needed by all new machines added to the Internet.

Moreover, IPv6 fixes a number of problems in IPv4, such as the limited number of available addresses. It also adds many improvements to IPv4 in areas such as routing and network auto-configuration. The new version is also expected to gradually replace the older one, with the two coexisting for a number of years during a transition period.

However, Internet experts opine that several key issues should be considered when reviewing the design for the next generation IP. For example, the new protocol must be able to support large global Internet works. There is also a need for a clear way to transition the current large installed base of IPv4 systems. The experts say that it does not matter how good a new protocol is if there isn’t a practical way to transition the current operational systems running IPv4 to the new protocol.

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