India runs short of Ip addresses

India is going to shift its domain name address protocol to IPv6 from the existing IPv4 protocol by march 2012. India, a bit late though, came to this plan in response the global scenario of the internet running short of IP addresses.

According to a report of the Internet and Mobile Association of India, and research firm IMRB International in september last year, about 52 million urban Indians were active Internet users. The problem is expected to worsen with the continuing rise of mobile phone subscribers and the rollout of 3G services by most of telecom operators and broadband wireless access (BWA). Mobile phones that support data will each require an IP address. As a solution to this problem in a statement issued by the government earlier this week, all ISPs and telecom providers will have to be IPv6-compliant by the end of 2011. The statement also said by March 2012, all central and state government ministries and public sector companies will make the switch to IPv6 Internet protocol based services.

IPv6, as an Internet protocol version, promises to offer a larger address space than the current IPv4. It uses a 128-bit address space which is much larger when compared to 32 bits in IPv4. IPv6 also has a level of security baked into the protocol. IPv6 carries capabilities for verifying addresses and known identities, and establishing trust between routers. Criminals would find it harder to use "IP spoofing" attacks, where packets of data misrepresent where they come from. Thus IPv6 based routers and firewalls should offer a better shield to anonymous attacks.

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