IPv6 is a must, must-have for India - the alternative is slow strangulation of access to the internet, deprivation of opportunities to create new Internet technologies and difficulty in providing access to the potential billions of people.

One of the favorite criticisms is how difficult it is to deploy V6. There is now a draft floating around in IETF, called 6rd, which plans to ease this, using a real life case study which went from proposal to deployment at 1.5 million users in a matter of 5 weeks.

It is called 6RD - 6 ‘Rapid Deployment’

Having ISPs to rapidly bring IPv6 to customers sites, in addition to IPv4 and without extra charge, is a way to break the existing vicious circle that has delayed IPv6 deployment: ISPs wait for customer demand before deploying IPv6; customers don’t demand IPv6 as long as application vendors announce that their products work on existing infrastructures (that are IPv4 with NATs); application vendors focus their investments on NAT traversal compatibility as long as ISPs don’t deploy IPv6.

But most ISPs are not willing to add IPv6 to their current offer, at no charge, unless incurred investment and operational costs are extremely limited. For this, ISPs that provide router CPEs to their customers have the most favorable conditions: they can upgrade their router CPEs to support IPv6 encapsulation and operate gateways between these infrastructures and the global IPv6 Internet to also do IPv6/v4 encapsulation, so that they can keep the routing plan of their IPv4 infrastructures. I hope the government picks this up and charts out a roadmap for IPV6 deployment - it is absolutely urgent.