'India yet to consider IPv6 as an option'

BANGALORE, INDIA: There will be serious implications if enterprises don't migrate to IPv6 and these implications will become evident as the IPv6-only portion of the Internet begins to grow, warns John Curran, president and CEO, American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN).

Experts warn that IPv4 will be depleted by early 2011, and this is the right time to migrate to IPv6, which is said to support four times the number of addresses than its predecessor.

Also Read: Report outlines IPv6 security challenges

Shridhar Luthria, manager, channel development, ResellerClub, Directi, says, "The rapid success of Internet in India has led to an accelerated consumption of IP addresses, and has led to the anxiety about shortage of IP addresses in the coming years in the country."

Every business today has an online presence and if they miss the bus to IPV6 today they are going to lose the game tomorrow.

"Enterprises and corporations may not be able to communicate with certain critical government resources, clients, and potential customers. Organizations that provide services over the Internet may experience customer and/or revenue losses if they do not update their offerings to include IPv6," adds Curran.

Today there are many products that are IPv6 enabled. Internet giants such as Google, who enabled IPv6 access to YouTube, and Microsoft, whose Vista and Windows 7 and latest OS are IPv6 by default, have already made the move. However, there are lot more, who haven't done so. As per reports, only .01 percent of IPv6 pool has been used up so far.

Now, here is a report from GigaOm's Blog, posted in 2005, where he says 'Asia says yes to IPV6, US says whatever', /

However, coming to reality, there are about 2,500 organizations in the ARIN region (Canada, the United States, and parts of the Caribbean) who will migrate to IPv6 by 2012. Whereas, India has only 33 IPv6 blocks assigned to it so far (IPv6actnow.com).

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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.