The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) will explain in a Web conference later Friday why migrating the Internet's infrastructure to IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) is critical for the nation's defense, and will present its plans for a two-week test program called Moon which will examine interoperability of IPv6 equipment, software and services.

One of the major factors driving the move from the current version of IP version 4, to IPv6 is a perceived scarcity of IP addresses for new devices such as Internet-enabled mobile phones. IPv4 addresses are 32 bits long, enough for around 4 billion unique addresses, although inefficiencies in the division and allocation of the address space means that many of these are not available for use. IPv6 extends the address length to 128 bits, or around 340 billion billion billion billion [BBBB] unique addresses.

While governments and network operators in Europe and Asia have been conducting large-scale tests of IPv6 for the last three years, the U.S. response to IPv6 has been "lackluster," according to the Web site of Moon's organizers. And the country is still playing catch-up: The tests the DOD will present originally were due to begin on Oct. 3 and finish Friday, but have not yet begun, according to information provided by the organizers.

Participants in the Moon tests include the DOD, the Interoperability Laboratory of the University of New Hampshire, the North American IPv6 Task Force, networking software and equipment vendors including IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Cisco Systems Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Nokia Corp., and the Japanese network operator Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT)., according to an invitation to attend a news conference about the tests.

IDG News Service

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