U.S. agencies are to switch their public-facing networks to IPv6 by Sept. 30, 2012, although they will continue to support IPv4 to avoid compatibility issues. Internally, the agencies can use IPv4 until Sept. 30, 2014.
White House CIO Vivek Kundra announced the deadlines Tuesday at a Washington, D.C., workshop hosted by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) also issued a memo with the compliance dates for the government’s e-mail, domain name, and Internet servers.
The current 32-bit IPv4 network standard dates back to 1980 and is running out of unique addresses, possibly as early as the end of next year. IPv4 provides nearly 4.5 billion addresses, but only about six percent of those are left for new devices.
IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, and Dave Evans, Cisco Systems’ chief technologist in its Internet business solutions group, has estimated that translates to “50 thousand trillion trillion addresses per person.”
Aiding Modernization
Federal agencies were also directed to appoint an IPv6 transition manager by Oct. 30. In addition, they must test their systems for IPv6 compatibility.
Kundra said the transition will support the federal agencies’ modernization efforts and set the stage for security in federal computer systems. The OMB will work with the National Institute for Standards and Technology on the IPv6 transition, and a federal task force will be formed to work with the agencies.
In addition to the trillions of new addresses, IPv6 is expected to bring other improvements, including in routing, network auto-configuration, and better handling of 3G mobile networks.
As we previously reported, an IPv6 summit in Ireland last May issued a warning about the consequences of running out of Internet addresses. Unless IPv6 is implemented, a task force said, “new startup businesses wishing to offer services on the Internet will find it very difficult or prohibitively expensive to secure…