All government organisations should have a plan to shift to a network that supports new version of internet addresses, IPv6, by 2017-end, Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal on Tuesday said.
“By 2017, we should we should be smart knowledge society. We will use IPv6 for rural emergency healthcare, tele-education, smart-metering, smartgrid, smart-building, smart-cities which has tremendous potential for socio-economic development of this country,” Sibal said while unveiling the roadmap.
The government has started issuing IPv6 address following shortage of previous version of internet address, IPv4.
“The current version, IPv4, has almost run out of addresses. The explosive growth of number of subscribers and the increasing number of devices has made it necessary to migrate to IPv6. Its adoption is must for secure and sustainable growth of internet,” Telecom Secretary R Chandrashekhar said.
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,” DoT Member (Tech) R K Bhatnagar said.
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,” Bhatnagar said.
Meanwhile, Sibal said the government will not extend tenure of Chandrasekhar.