The Hindu : National : Major players set to meet IPv6 deadline

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Monday, Jun 20, 2011
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National

Major players set to meet IPv6 deadline

T. Ramachandran

Almost all major ISPs have started offering enterprise IPv6 services
Lack of IPv6-ready equipment and applications and poor customer awareness are the challenges

KOCHI: Major internet service providers (ISPs) in the country are on the way to meeting the December 2011 deadline set by the government for making their networks capable of handling traffic under the new Internet address protocol IPv6, say experts.

Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers Association of India, told The Hindu that he had no doubts about the commencement of IPv6 services by December “as per the guideline of the government.”

The IPv6 Task Force, which officially oversees the country's transition from the old IPv4 protocol to the new one, said almost all major ISPs had started providing enterprise IPv6 services and were working towards rolling out retail broadband services. They had given an assurance at review meetings that IPv6 services would be in the offing by December 2011. (Major ISPs are those having at least 10,000 Internet customers or deploying STM-1 bandwidth).

The task force made this evaluation in a newsletter released in connection with the World IPv6 Day on June 8, when numerous organisations and service-providers tested the functioning of the new protocol worldwide. The transition has become necessary because the world is facing an acute IPv4 resource crunch.

The December 2011 deadline for the major ISPs had been set in the National IPv6 Deployment Road map released officially last year. The smaller ISPs were expected to follow suit subsequently.

The target for Central and State Ministries and Departments, as well as the public sector undertakings, to start using IPv6 services is March 2012. Almost all governmental organisations have appointed IPv6 nodal officers and are getting set for the adoption of the new protocol as per the deadline, according to the task force.

Asked about the emerging situation with regard to IPv6, Yves Poppe, Head-IPv6, Tata Communications, said: “At this point in time, all major ISPs are accelerating plans for IPv6 deployment, while some, including Tata Communications, have been proactive. We are at present providing IPv6 access in addition to IPv4 in all major urban centres and are very active in some of the government-initiated IPv6 working groups, including mobile. By the end of the year, ISPs should be able to provide dual stack (Ipv4 and IPv6) or tunnelled IPv6 (IPv6 encapsulated in IPv4) to their customers.”

Anand Patil, vice-president, Systems Engineering, Cisco Systems India, explained that IPv6-capable equipment had been available for a while. “The transition to IPv6 is not an overnight phenomenon. It had been predicted a long time ago. As such, most manufacturers of networking equipment and applications have already built IPv6 capability in their systems.”

Cisco itself had been instrumental in establishing specifications, developing and delivering IPv6 products from the mid-1990s.

Some of the challenges the service-providers highlighted at the task force meetings were the lack of IPv6-ready equipment on the customer premises, lack of applications and content and poor customer awareness of the need for adopting the new protocol. “ISPs serving large numbers of end-users face more of a challenge as customer premises equipment such as routers and DSL boxes are often not IPv6-ready,” said Mr. Poppe.

The lack of IPv6-enabled web content was a ‘significant stumbling block.' At meetings with the Department of Telecommunications, some of the content-providers had agreed to make their services IPv6-ready by December 2011. Content-providers and hosters need to make a major effort at ensuring that content is accessible on both IPv4 and IPv6 channels, according to Mr. Poppe.

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