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GCN Home > 07/02/07 issue

Agencies, start your protocols!

Federal agencies scurry to meet next year’s deadline for implementing IPv6

By William Jackson

By this time next year, all federal agencies must have their networks running Version 6 of the Internet Protocol. Some will meet the deadline, some won’t.

The CIO Council’s IPv6 working group has established three criteria for successfully meeting the mandate to enable the next generation of IP on agency network backbones. They must be able to:
  • Transport IPv6 traffic from an external network to the core and deliver it to a subnet.
  • Push IPv6 traffic from an internal subnet to an external network.
  • Route traffic around the core from one subnet to another.
A little less than a year before the June 30, 2008, deadline for putting IPv6 on networks, agency progress is a mixed bag, said Commerce Department Chief Technology Officer John McManus, who is co-chairman of the working group.

Realistically, not all are expected to make it on time. He estimated that for about 30 percent of agencies, the transition will simply be a part of their network evolution, as envisioned by the Office of Management and Budget when it handed down the mandate. Another 50 percent to 65 percent will have to work to meet the deadline. The remaining 5 percent to 20 percent will be behind.

Catch up or Catch-22?
What accounts for agencies’ varying levels of progress? A variety of factors, including the size and complexity of the networks in question, the resources available for planning and training, and competing priorities such as compliance with federal information technology security requirements and mandates to issue a new generation of smart government identification cards.

OMB put the federal government at the forefront of the transition when it decided IPv6 is the future of networking. Industry experts say momentum in the transition is shifting from Asia to North America. The move is expected not only to help the government get out from under a creaking Internet infrastructure that has expanded — in both size and functionality — far beyond its intended scope, but also to enable a wide range of new applications.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, IPv6, IT Management, Web Strategies



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