The Hindu : Business : 'Next Internet' comes to India

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Mar 05, 2005

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Business

'Next Internet' comes to India

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE, MARCH 4. The Satyam's Sify network for the Internet has upgraded to the global information Web's next `avatar'. Last week, the pioneer among private data networks in the country announced the commercial deployment of the next-generation Internet Protocol Version 6 or IPv6, an advance on the current version 4.

In practical terms IPv6 means the pool of possible unique web addresses explodes from something like four billion worldwide, to a virtually infinite number — to be exact four billion times four billion. It is possible because the new protocol increases the string of numbers, which make up the familiar dot com or dot org type address, from 32 bits or digits, to 128 bits.

This has become urgent, as the present pool of addresses, is almost fully used and is expected to dry up within the decade — bad news for late entrants like India whose Internet usage is only now growing.

The new Version 6 was first mooted a decade ago, by the Web's monitor — the non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) — and India has one of the relatively quick movers who signed up.

In July last year, after a historic meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, ICANN formally announced that it was moving to the new Internet era and allowing the first counties — Korea, Japan and France — to upgrade to IPv6. Now, Satyam's deployment means India-based corporates too, can `talk' to these nations, better, faster, even as compatibility with the existing standard will ensure that we remain connected with the rest of the world. The change involves considerable upgradation cost to service providers like Sify, by way of the infrastructure — but this has become crucial, now that India is aggressively pursuing its own identity on the Net with the `.in' address.

To lay citizens the implication is more basic. The availability of the enhanced address pool means every human on the planet can have a unique identity on the Internet — a goal first articulated at the UN sponsored-World Summit of the Information Society in Geneva December 2003, as a means to remove basic inequalities.

The next summit scheduled to take place between November 16 and 18 this year in Tunisia is likely to take stock on how closer the world is to achieving goal, now that even so-called `developing' nations like India have embraced the new Internet era.

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