Telecom Lead India: Indian government organisations plan to shift to a network that supports new version of internet addresses, IPv6, by 2017-end.
Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal said that Internet is an important tool to connect not only people but people and devices.
The explosive growth of mobile subscribers and exponential growth of data has made it imperative to transit to IPv6 to move to smart knowledge society.
The minister said that Internet of Things (IoT) offers opportunity for India whereby products and services based on IPv6 can be manufactured here and exported globally.
“IPv6 based applications in areas like rural emergency healthcare tele-education, smart metering, smart grid, smart building, smart city etc. have potential to boost the socio-economic development of the country,” said Sibal while unveiling the IPv6 roadmap.
R Chandrashekhar, secretary, DoT underlined the need for a planned and gradual transition. The Roadmap will pave the way for bridging the digital divide as it is vital for achieving the broadband growth.
RK Bhatnagar, member (Technology), DoT, said: “India IPv6 Centre of Innovation will be set up by DoT for facilitating IPv6 transition in the country as per the roadmap.”
The government has started issuing IPv6 addresses following shortage of previous version of internet address, IPv4.
According to the plan, DoT has said that government organisations should prepare a detailed transition plan for complete migration to IPv6 by December 2017.
The plan should be prepared latest by December 2013 and accordingly the required budgetary provisions should be made in their demand for grant. For this purpose, it is recommended that a dedicated transition unit in each organisation should be formed immediately to facilitate entire transition.
The roadmap mandates that all internet connections provided to business organisations should support new version of internet addresses, IPv6, from January 1, 2014 onwards.
All new enterprise customer connections, both wireless and wireline, provided by Service Providers on or after 01-01-2014 shall be capable of carrying IPv6 traffic either on dual stack or on native IPv6.
As per the IPv6 adoption plan, all new IP based services like cloud computing, data centres etc., to be provisioned for and by the government organisations should be on dual stack.
This means it should support both IPv6 traffic as well as current version of internet addresses IPv4 with immediate effect.
The public interface of all government projects for delivery of citizen centric services should be on dual stack supporting IPv6 traffic latest by January 1, 2015.
The government organisations should procure equipments which are also IPv6 Ready (Dual Stack) and go for deployment of IPv6 ready (Dual Stack) networks with end-to-end IPv6 supported applications.
