Brussels, 21/02/2002 (Agence Europe) - On Thursday, the European Commission adopted a communication entitled "Next Generation Internet: action priority in the migration towards Internet Protocol Ipv6", developed by services under Commissioner Erkki Liikanen. It aims above all at giving political impetus to the development of a new protocol likely to cover all the needs for connection on a global scale.
The Internet as it works today is based on a protocol (IPv4) conceived in the 1970s, which offers a little over 4 billion addresses that condition access to the network. The success encountered by the Web has gradually exhausted this capital and the address space should be completely saturated towards 2005. The IPv4 is no longer suitable for new applications such as cordless post to post communications, mobile data processing or third generation telephony. In the EU, this situation is made even worse by the unequal repartition of IPv4 addresses, 74% of which are attributed to North American bodies: the Standford University and the Massachussets Institute of Technology each have a number of addresses that exceed that of the People's Republic of China.
The Commission proposes to speed up the development of a new protocol, Ipv6, and of applications allowing the connection of new kinds of devices to the Internet (such as mobile phones, car navigation systems, household devices and other electronic instruments). The IPv6 would offer space for 2128 addresses (4 billion x 4 billion x 4 billion x 4 billion) that is "more spaces in cyberspace than grains of sand on all the beaches in the world", said the Commission. The first trials of IPv6 date back to 1996 and an experimental network already covers 50 countries and 1000 sites. Commercial applications are beginning to develop in Asia (because of the few number of IPv4 addresses) and in Japan, which fixed a timetable in September 2000 for deployment of IPv6. Korea followed this example in February 2001.
In its communication, the Commission mainly recommends that Member States: - give their support to transition to IPv6 of public sector networks and services, including teaching establishments; - develop educational programmes concerning the technical tools and applications of IPv6; - organise awareness campaigns for promoting the adoption of the new protocol by the SMEs, Internet service providers, and operators and consumers; - and provide incentives for the development and testing of IPv6 products, tools, services and applications in sectors of the new economy. It also calls on enterprise to: - fully participate in the activities of the 6th Framework Programme for Research and Development (FPRD); - resolve the problems relating to interoperability between providers which hampers the deployment of large scale IP security; - devote efforts to the establishment of an IPv6 education and training programme at European scale; - integrate IPv6 into their strategic plans and take early measures to obtain an adequate number of IPv6 addresses.
In the context of the 6th FPRD, the draft of which provides for a financial allocation of EUR 3.6 billion for the section "information society technologies" over the period 2002-2006, the Commission proposes to place emphasis on the various aspects linked to the deployment of IPv6: - fixed wide band and cordless infrastructures; interoperability; development of tools, devices and elements of the network; advanced infrastructures (GEANT and GRIDs); development of a source code; and the launching of a socio-economic and market study. It also provides for a study on the impact of the future evolution of the Internet, mainly of the new protocol, on the right to privacy and data protection, so that the norms and specifications fully take these aspects into account. The mandate of the "IPv6 task force" should be renewed and extended to cover: - an effective link with the bodies for the standardisation and management of the Internet (ISOC, IETF, ICANN, RIPE NCC, 3GPP, ETSI, IPv6 Forum, Eurescom, ETNO, UMTS Forum and GSM Europe); - the elaboration of an action plan on the development and prospects of the new protocol, regularly updated; - and cooperation with similar initiatives in other regions of the world.