India draws roadmap for new domain name protocol

"Over 18.4 million registered addresses in India have overburdened the initial version of address platforms, which is expected to exhaust the available space globally by March 2012," a statement issued by the ministry of communications and information technology said Wednesday.

The roadmap, spelt out by the technical arm of Department of Telecommunications (DoT), will be implemented by all telecom and Internet providers, central and state government departments, industry associations, education institutes and equipment manufacturers, the ministry said.

"This roadmap and the formation of the IPv6 task force together will enable citizens to start using IPv6 services by March 2012," Communications Minister A. Raja said. "For this all telecom and internet service providers are required to become IPv6 compliant by December-2011," he said.

"Internet Protocol is slowly emerging as a global standard for communication. The current Internet protocol IPv4 served well in last 25 years but it has practical limitations," added Minister of State for Communications Sachin Pilot.

"The new Internet protocol will give practically unlimited addresses besides a host of new and advanced features for running the future communication networks."

Officials said the new protocol was a scalable technology with the potential to spread the Internet reach to each of India's 1.17 billion people of India. It is already being implemented in the US, EU and Japan, among other countries.