Govt Websites Will Be On IPv6 By Year-End

Websites of all government organisations will move to the new Internet Protocol (IP), IPv6, by the year-end, the communications and information technology ministry said.

"A direction has been issued to all the government organisations to migrate their websites to IPv6 by December 2012," the ministry said in a statement. "As IPv6 is not backward compatible with IPv4, the transition to IPv6 is likely to be a complex, mammoth and long-term exercise during which both IPv4 and IPv6 will co-exist," it added.

Internet protocol is a set of methods by which data is sent from one computer to another on the Internet. Currently the websites run on IPv4.

"For India this transition is not only urgent but also very important," said R. Chandrasekhar, secretary, department of telecom, at an event organised to mark World IPv6 Launch Day here.

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Currently India has 35 million IPv4 addresses against a user base of about 360 million. In addition, the government is planning to have a target of 160 million and 600 million broadband customers by the year 2017 and 2020 respectively.

Moreover, there is a strong security requirement to provide unique IP address to each individual data user.

The IPv6 improves on the addressing capacities of IPv4 by using 128 bits instead of 32 bits, thereby practically making available an almost infinite pool of IP addresses.