On June 30, U.S. federal government officials expect to declare an early victory on the IPv6 front. But they admit that meeting their much-heralded June 30 deadline for IPv6 compatibility is just the opening salvo of a long-term battle to get their networks ready for the Internet of the future.

Under a White House policy issued in August 2005, all federal agencies must demonstrate the ability to pass IPv6 packets across their backbone networks by this deadline.

Federal officials and IPv6 service providers are reporting little last-minute scrambling by agency CIOs or their network operations staff. That's because the federal IPv6 requirements aren't too difficult to meet, according to industry experts who predict agencies will file the required IPv6 test results on time to the Office of Management and Budget.  

"It's surprisingly quiet given all the focus and attention and money that the agencies have spent on the IPv6 initiative and planning for it," says Bill White, vice president of federal sales for Sprint, which has worked with a half-dozen federal agencies to meet the mandate. "Agencies have done their testing and they have done the minimum to be in adherence with the OMB mandate."

"I have not heard of anybody who is not going to make the IPv6 deadline," says Pete Tseronis, chair of the IPv6 working group of the Federal CIO Council and a senior technical advisor at the U.S. Department of Energy. "For the last two-and-a-half years, agencies have been reporting on their IPv6 progress through their Enterprise Architecture quarterly and annual reports. … If someone doesn't make the deadline, it will be interesting to know why."

Click to see: Chart of OMB's IPv6 mandate

While the federal IPv6 deadline appears to be coming and going without drama, it is still a significant milestone in the anticipated rollout of the next-generation Internet. IPv6 has been available for a decade but has yet to be widely deployed.

IPv6 is an upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol that provides virtually unlimited address space, built-in security and simplified network management. Created by the Internet Engineering Task Force in 1998, IPv6 replaces IPv4, which supports 4.3 billion individually addressed devices on the network.

IPv4 address space is running out, and experts agree that the 27-year-old protocol will not support all the Internet-connected devices used by the world's 6.5 billion people in the future. IPv6 provides so many IP addresses — 2 to the 128th power — that it is expected to enable secure, mobile and embedded applications that are inconceivable today.