Bangalore might soon have a metropolitan city IPv6 test bed which should facilitate its adoption. According to the IPv6 Forum in India, the test bed should become functional in two months.

"We have been in talks with infrastructure vendors, ISPs and the government for over one and a half years. The project is falling into place," said Hemanth Dattatreya, vice-president, international liaisons and industry partnerships of the IPv6 forum in India.

It is an arm of the international IPv6 Forum, in Luxembourg, and is an autonomous, non-profit organisation working to increase awareness on IPv6.

A lot of work is on in IPv6 in India in companies like HP and third party service providers who develop IPv6 software or applications for foreign market. But there has been a delay in its adoption due to the logistics involved to get corporates and government agencies to work together.

In the last two years, with companies increasingly seeing India as a marketplace, a need has arisen for a test bed of IPv6 activity to facilitate more work and applications pertinent to the country.

"The plan is to set up the test bed in Bangalore. C-DAC has agreed to be the host as an independent, unbiased body and it will be facilitated by ERNET. The test bed will become common ground for vendors and application developers who can work more freely on IPv6 without worrying about individual economic burdens," adds Dattatreya.

IPv6 or Internet Protocol version 6 is not new. It was developed almost a decade ago by the Internet Engineering Task Force to replace the version of IP (IPv4) on which the Internet runs. The main reason for the development was what IETF predicted would be a non-availability of IP addresses by 2008.

IPv4 being 32 bit makes space for over 4 billion addresses. But, the growth of the Internet was never predicted. Now with over 70 per cent of the addresses being hogged by the US, most developing nations where Internet usage is growing faster will face an address shortage.

India has been allocated only 2.2 million IP addresses, while China has something like 28 million. IPv6 remedies this. Based on 128 bit technology, it provides for 340 undecillion (340 trillion trillion trillion) number of addresses, over one for each living being on earth.

The technology has potential for countries like India with its vast population. IPv6, by enabling more devices to connect to the Internet, will increase easier penetration of such devices.

"IPv6 implementations globally is happening in two ways. First, as a test and trial method. This is being done by individual companies and in India there are MNCs including HP which have implemented IPv6 in their internal networks for testing. The other is commercial deployment. That unfortunately has not happened in India," says Jayachandra K, president of the forum.

Many countries in Asia, including Japan and China, have charted out complete movement to IPv6 by 2005 but India has not. Government indifference has caused this. But that might change. The new IT and communications minister Dayanidhi Maran's 10-point agenda for IT includes moving to IPv6 by 2006.

More important though, is the resistance of ISPs to change. Most of them, who invested in IPv4 infrastructure, are loath to change it in the near future as they do not see an immediate business compulsion.

Dattatreya said, "We are working on that angle with CEO Tracks and other meetings. We are also trying to create volunteers to spread the message of IPv6. We missed the first generation. We should not miss out the next. Most infrastructure today are IPv6 ready. It remains only a case of enabling it. The NIXI (national internet exchange) already has infrastructure in place that is IPv6 ready."