What Challenges will IPv6 Migration Face in India?

As the country sees explosive rise in the number of devices that connect to the web, lack of new addresses will choke internet growth. India has nearly 120 mn internet users, growing at a rate of 30% a year, and out of the 850 mn mobile subscribers, only about 40 mn access internet using mobile devices.

The transition from IPv4 to IPv6 in India is not only crucial but also holds significant importance. It is a complex, mammoth, and long-term exercise during which both IPv4 and IPv6 will co-exist. Currently, in India, IPv6 adoption is at a dismal 0.04% (data by Google).

For developing econo­mies like India there are organizations which will face difficulties and will not be able to switch to IPv6 network immediately.

To put the screw on, last year, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) laid down the rules of the game. DoT provided its National IPv6 deployment policy‘ guidelines under which all major service providers (having at least 10,000 internet customers or STM-1 bandwidth) will target to handle IPv6 traffic and offer IPv6 services by December 2011.

All central and state government ministries and departments, including its PSUs, shall start using IPv6 services by March 2012, Formation of the India IPv6 Task Force.

However, the govern­ment websites managed by National Informatics Center have been made IPv6 compliant but the transition process to make all government websites compliant is still running behind schedule.

"To adopt IPv6, various companies need to dis­cuss, develop, and imple­ment strategies for making the transition to IPv6 possible," insists Yves Poppe, director, business development, IP strategy, Tata Communications.

Since network needs differ with businesses, IPv6 transition strategies and related costs will also vary between organizations.

Hardware and software vendors (OEMs') are increasingly integrating IPv6 as a standard feature in products, allowing or­ganizations (their custom­ers) to deploy IPv6 as part of routine upgrade cycles But it comes at an addi­tional cost as they have to rewrite their source code for firmware/software.

For enterprises and PSUs, operational costs, including staff training and one-time administra­tive costs (adding IPv6 to management databases and documentation) are likely to constitute the majority of the cost of upgrading to IPv6.

Organizations that run in-house customized soft­ware will experience ad­ditional costs to upgrade these applications to Ipv6. Adding to the woes, there are other challenges that also co-exist including:

Lack of IPv6 skilled resources, planning of the IPv6 adoption costs, and budgets

Lack of IPv6 ready products and performance impact on the network based on the IPv6 adop­tion design,' said Anuj Bhalla, business unit head, enterprise services, Wipro Infotech

For end-users, thankful­ly, there won't be any addi­tional costs as the today's operating systems like Mac OS, Windows or Android already have inbuilt Ipv6 support. IP address alloca­tion worldwide is done by international agency IANA which is complemented by regional internet registry agencies like APNIC for APAC etc. Once organiza­tions are allocated their IP addresses, they may or may not require all of the IP address pool. Thus, companies like Tata Com­munications, Wipro are helping enterprises migrate seamlessly to IPv6.

Thus, by educating the masses on the benefits of IPv6 we will be able to create a platform which will lead to fruitful adop­tion of IPv6 across India. "It is very important for our regulatory bodies and government to conduct ac­tivities related to enlight­enment, publicity, and education on IPv6 along with organizing training programs, workshops, conferences, and tutori­als," insists Yves Poppe, director, business devel­opment, IP strategy, Tata Communications.

There are numerous advantages of IPv6 apart from faster internet, secu­rity, and its data carrying capability. It restores p2p (peer-to-peer) communi­cation and has better QoS (quality of service) for flow labels as well as offer the option of IP address based billing. IPv6 neighbor discovery would also al­low many more hosts in the cloud which elimi­nates the need for ARP broadcast chatter. The rise of cloud computing would also lead to rise in demand for off site storage centers. Similarly, virtu­alization of data storage and data processing would benefit from the persistent addresses of IPv6.