Indian ISPs all set to migrate to Ipv6

BANGALORE, INDIA: Major Internet Service Providers (ISPs), networking equipment manufacturers and web companies around the world are coming together on the World IPv6 Launch Day on Wednesday (June 6), to permanently enable IPv6 for their products and services.

This day, being organized by the Internet Society, represents a major milestone in the global deployment of Ipv6, said a release from the Ministry of Communications and IT. It builds on the successful one-day World IPv6 Day event held on June 8 last year, wherein top websites and Internet Service Providers from across the globe ran a successful 24-hour global-scale trial of IPv6.

The current version of the Internet Protocol, IPv4, is in existence for about 27 years and has many limitations. It is to be replaced by IPv6 to overcome the limitations.

As a result of the initiatives undertaken by the Department of Telecommunication (DoT), majority of the major service providers in India are ready to handle traffic and offer IPv6 services at present.

Despite the readiness of the major service providers, there are issues to be addressed so as to ensure that the complete ecosystem migrates to IPv6. The service providers have mainly three challenges: readiness of the content providers, equipment vendors and end user devices. To tackle the above challenges, a lead has been taken by DoT and the respective stakeholders were being pursued with by DoT through extensive discussions and meetings, stated the release.

Currently, India has 35 million IPv4 addresses against a user base of about 360 million data users. In addition, the Centre is planning to have a target of 160 million and 600 million broadband customers by 2017 and 2020, respectively.

Moreover, there is a strong security requirement to provide unique IP address to each individual data user. As IPv6 is not backward compatible with IPv4, the transition to IPv6 is likely to be a complex, mammoth and long-term exercise, during which both IPv4 and IPv6 will co-exist.

In order to facilitate the widespread introduction of IPv6 in India, a policy document titled 'National IPv6 Deployment Roadmap' was released by the DoT in July 2010. The first initiative of its kind by a government anywhere in the world, the roadmap's main focus was to sensitize the Indian ecosystem about the issues related to IPv6 and enable it to take the first step in the transition towards IPv6.