In India we saw the Department of Telecommunications take action. Late June the Telecom Engineering Centre organized a seminar where the recommendations for IPv4 to IPv6 transition put forward by the regulator (TRAI) were adopted.
The highlights of the plan reflect a traditional Indian non aggressive but nonetheless forceful persuasion.
- Migration through encouragement rather than through mandate
- Increase awareness of IPv6 deployment through workshops and seminars organized through all relevant agencies through private and public partnership programs.
- Creation of a National Internet Registry in India.
- Government's procurement of IT systems and networks are to be IPv6 compatible.
- DoT encourages and supports setting up testbeds including one by TEC which is already a certifying agency.
- The international gateways are to be upgraded to support IPv6; IPv4 and IPv6 equipment will coexist for quite some time but all new equipment deployed by end 2010 must support IPv6
- Telecom Equipment manufacturers should make an effort for indigenous production and development of IPv6 compliant equipment .
- The objective is for the Indian Telecom Industry to use the IPv6 migration/transition for competitive advantage developing innovative IPv6 based applications and to provide full featured value added services on IPv6.
New Zealand chose a similar approach: The Government will act by example, not regulation as they said at a recent series of conferences. And in the United States we saw NIST issue the latest version of the IPv6 test program while the Department of Defense issued an update on its IPv6 Standard Profile requirements. The OECD,in the meantime, published its Communications Outlook 2009 with its heavy complement of statistics including the IP address situation.
July saw IETF75 meet in Stockholm and the adequately named 'Behave Working Group' spent considerable time on translation between future IPv6 only, dual stack and old IPv4 only devices and networks. Experts also continued to be knotted in NATland where one can even find a NAT66. Will we see a NAT666 one day? Vade retro Natanas!
Written by Yves Poppe, Director, Business Development IP Strategy