Fergie's Tech Blog

Update: OMB: IPv6 by June 2008

In an update to the story from yesterday on "Congress To Study Slow Pace Of Migration To IPv6", we now have this revelation from FCW.com (written by David Perera):

The federal government will transition to IP Version 6 (IPv6) by June 2008, said Karen Evans, the Office of Management and Budget’s administrator of e-government and information technology.

“Once the network backbones are ready, the applications and other elements will follow,” she said today while testifying before the House Government Reform Committee.

So it's official -- U.S. Government agencies will be inflicting severe pain and suffering on themselves, insofar as migrating to their new IPv6 networking infrastructure is concerned.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Update: In addition the two articles mentioned above, here's an update. However, bear in mind that "newer" doesn't mean "better". The Internet is about end-to-end connectivity, not if one version of a particluar set of protocols is newer than another. It's all about the connectivity, man. Bear in mind--and as Congressman Tom Davis mentions in the article below--the primary reason that Asia (and to a lesser extent Europe) is primarily interested in IPv6 is that it has a larger pool of available IP host addresses. Virtually all of the "newer" functionality that IPv6 offers has been retro-fitted into IPv4.

In an article entitled "Hearings Spotlight Asia's Push To Adopt IPv6", W. David Gardner writes in TechWeb News that:

In Congressional hearings on the Internet upgrade to IPv6, much attention was focused Thursday on the presumed lead over the U.S. by Asian countries, which are boldly moving to the new Web technology.

"Asian countries have been aggressive in adopting IPv6 technology, because Asia controls only about 9 percent of the allocated IPv4 addresses and yet has more than half of the world's population," Congressman Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), chairman of the Committee on Government Reform, said at the hearings.

Davis noted that Asian governments have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in IPv6 technology, which vastly opens up the number of Internet addresses over the current IPv4 technology. Among the additional advantages of IPv6 are improved security measures and additional links for wireless devices.

posted by Fergie @ 6/30/2005 10:31:00 AM