The Hindu : Business : 'New Internet' for India by 2006

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Mar 19, 2005

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'New Internet' for India by 2006

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE, MARCH 18. The Indian Government was `deeply committed' to the next Net standard and had set end-2006, as the target for all service providers in the country to upgrade to the new Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), a senior official of the Union Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) announced here today.

Speaking at the sixth Global IPv6 Summit, K. B. Narayanan, Director in the MCIT's Department of Information Technology, said the migration to the new standard that would explode the availability of Internet addresses, was part and parcel of the nation's ten-point agenda to embrace broadband connectivity and create 20 million high-speed connections within five years. To kickstart the switch to IPv6, a test bed was being set up by the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, jointly with the educational and research network, ERNET, while the Bangalore -based Indian Institute of Science and CMC (now a Tata entity) were supporting with research and development. Earlier in the month, Sify became the first Indian Internet provider to upgrade all its circuits to IPv6.

In his keynote address, Latif Ladid, Luxembourg-based President of the global IPv6 Forum and chairperson of the European Taskforce, suggested that the real urgency to migrate, lay in nations like India and China which were witnessing an explosion of telecommunication infrastructure, accompanied by a rapid depletion in the number of available IP addresses. Europe and North America could afford to be complacent, since the problem was as yet not so serious there.

However, he urged the Indian Government to create a national Internet address registry to ensure full control of and security for its own domain. The National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) and the recent thrust in expanding the `.in' national address registry were steps in this direction but need to be sharply beefed up before the change over to IPv6, exploded the addresses allocated in India, he added.

The global Forum honoured three dedicated evangelisers of IPv6 in India with its annual awards — Jay Chandra K and Hemanth Dattatreya, President and Vice President, respectively of the Indian IPv6 Forum; and Gopi Krishna S. Garge, Coordinator of `6India', the Indo European joint initiative in IPv6.

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