European Commission targets 25% IPv6 availability by 2010

On Wednesday, the European Commission, which is the European Union's executive branch, sent an IPv6 action plan to the European Parliament and the European Council. In the plan, the Commission recognizes that "timely implementation of IPv6 is required" as we run out of IPv4 addresses and that IPv6 "provides a platform for innovation in IP based services and applications." However, "adoption of the new protocol has remained slow while the issue of future IP address scarcity is becoming more urgent." So the Commission has put forward the target of enabling 25 percent of users to connect to the IPv6 Internet and use important services over IPv6 by 2010.

The 2010 deadline allows for a one-year margin of error before we're scheduled to run out of IPv4 address space. This seems an ambitious goal, especially since the European Commission is only presenting a plan—the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament have to sign on to the plan, and then it has to be put into action.

The Commission will make the "Europa" and "CORDIS" web sites reachable over IPv6 by 2010 and plans to work with EU members to enable IPv6 on public sector websites and with e-government services. But most of the work will have to be done by member states and the private sector. The Commission specifically calls upon the top 100 European web sites to become IPv6-reachable by 2010. Last but not least, the plan calls for generating demand for IPv6 by requiring IPv6 in its own procurements and those of its 27 member states.

If the plan is adopted, the emphasis on the new version of the Internet Protocol—and mostly the procurement requirements—will certainly increase by a bit—or even a lot. But then what? In 2010, the assumption will still be that IPv4 is the "normal" protocol and IPv6 the "extra" protocol. In that situation, the user experience for those who only have IPv6 will be suboptimal at best. But the European Commission rejects gateways to allow IPv4 and IPv6 users to talk to each other as not future-proof. They're right—but moving from the existing IPv4 Internet to a future-proof IPv6 Internet in a single step is probably too much to ask.