NEW DELHI: The Government has decided to form an Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) task force in Public Private Partnership (PPP) mode for timely implementation of IPv6 in the country.
This follows its decision to have a roadmap for IPv6 deployment in a time bound manner.
All major Service providers (having at least 10,000 internet customers or STM-1 bandwidth) will target to handle IPv6 traffic and offer IPv6 services by December 2011.
All Central and State Government Ministries and Departments, including its PSUs, shall switch over to IPv6 services by March 2012.
The roadmap has been prepared by the Telecommunication Engineering Centre (TEC), the technical arm of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT).
This was disclosed by Communications & Information Technology Minister A Raja here while releasing the National IPv6 Deployment Roadmap.
IPv4, the initial version of address platform, is already overburdened in India with 18.4 million registered addresses and is expected to exhaust the available space globally by March 2012.
Stating that IPv6 deployment in India has so far been mostly a Government led initiative, the Minister invited all the stakeholders to come forward and to make the activities of this task force a success.
The Minister said that this roadmap and the formation of the IPv6 Task Force together would enable citizens to start using IPv6 services by March 2012. For this, all telecom and Internet service providers are required to become IPv6 compliant by December-2011 and offer IPv6 services thereafter.
The important issue of transition from IPv4 to IPv6 in the country has emerged has a critical concern for quite some time in view of the increasing demand for IP addresses and global scarcity of free space on IPv4 platform. Fast exhausting of IPv4 address space, growing demand for new addresses globally and expanding communication networks have necessitated timely action and implementation of new strategies to address the issue. IPv6 has 128 bits as compared to the limited addressing space of only 32 bits in IPv4.
