The first civilian agency in the United Sates of America to become fully IPv6 compliant is the U.S. General Services Administration.

The U.S. General Services Administration was migrated from IPv4 to IPv6 as part of a government wholesale move to the new Internet protocol. The new IPv6 layer succeeds the IPv4 as it will probably run out of internet addresses come 2012 according to Level 3 Communications who did the migration.

General Manager of Level 3’s federal segment says: “Due to the size and scale of the Level 3 network, our company has been a leader in the development, adoption, and deployment of new standards, and we intend to follow a similar path with regard to IPv6.”

IPv4 can accommodate 4 billion internet addresses, but the new IPv6 can manage more than 10 billion billion billion addresses, and that is a lot of addresses.

The upgrade from IPv4 to IPv6 is expected to cost several billion dollars.

Image via here

Source — informationweek