The Philippine government, led by the Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT), is actively taking steps to hasten the country's transition to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) in response to the announcement made last February that the last batch of IPV4 addresses has been allocated to all Internet registries.
"The deployment of IPV6 will require a carefully crafted migration strategy. We must prepare for this very thoroughly and consider elements such as prioritization of activities and identification of resources needed such as budget and human resources," CICT Commissioner Ivan John Uy said at the opening of the "IPV6 Seminar: The Internet is Changing: Are You Ready?" held in Manila recently.
The event jointly hosted by CICT and Cisco brought together government officials from various agencies involved in the upcoming IPV6 migration.
The government has mandated that within two years from the affectivity of Executive order 893 issued in June 2010, government online services should be IPV6-compliant. This means government agencies must formulate their IPV6 migration plan.
"I wish to highlight that the continued partnership among the public and private sectors will continue to play a strategic role in the promotion of migration to this new system," Uy said.
The Facts
The Number Resource Organization (NRO), the body which represents the world's five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), has announced on February 3, 2011 that the free pool of available IPv4 addresses has been fully depleted.
The announcement was made following the news that Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) had allocated the five remaining address blocks to the RIRs.
Consequently, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), which allocates Internet resource and registration services in the Asia-Pacific region, got its last block of IPV4 addresses in the available pool. Each address block is referred to as a "/8" block and contains approximately 16.5 million IP addresses.
With exhaustion of IPV4 addresses, which has been the Internet Protocol used since 1981, the world's attention has turned to IPV6, the Internet Protocol (IP) designed to succeed Internet Protocol version 4 and developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 1996.