Are Government Agencies Ready for IPv6?

April 1st, 2008 by Julia Lim

We’re conducting a survey today at FOSE, and question #1 is “Will your agency be ready for the IPv6 June 2008 mandate?” This has brought up a number of questions and conversations about the mandate. Honestly, I think most of the people going by don’t really know what the mandate is - and that’s the real issue. From GCN:

…agencies only have to have their backbone networks enabled for IPv6 by the end of next June. They don’t have to be running IPv6 across their networks…

It’s interesting that the people who said IPv6 was important on the survey didn’t have a lot of details and stories about why.

The people who said it was not important had a lot to say:

• One three-letter agency absolutely won’t be ready because they’re all private LANs anyway and don’t even know how many IP addresses they have
• Only ARIN cares anyway because they ran out of IP addresses
• Another three-letter agency is too busy getting their new network done - and that project is taking up all the time and all the money
• Where would the money come from to upgrade/replace all the gear to support IPv6?
• For the purposes of the mandate, it’s just the carriers that have to deal with IPv6 on the backbone anyway, so why should the government agencies be worried about it?

Popularity: 15% [?]

April 1st, 2008