IPv6 has finally reached the tipping point in the U.S. government market, according to the second annual survey of federal, state and local agency IT executives released last week by Juniper.

IPv6 is a long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol, known as IPv4. U.S. federal agencies are under a mandate to support IPv6 by 2008.

The latest Juniper survey found government agencies are making significant progress in IPv6 adoption:

* A majority of federal IT officials now say that IPv6 is important in supporting their IT goals, which wasn’t the case a year ago.

* Seventy percent of survey respondents say that a lack of additional IPv4 addresses would have a negative impact on their agencies.

* The number of agencies that have written IPv6 transition plans has more than doubled from last year to 34% of Defense agencies and 25% of civilian agencies.

"Federal agencies are responding to the Office of Management and Budget mandate," says Tom Kreidler, vice president for federal operations at Juniper. "Civilian agencies are catching up to Defense agencies. IPv6 is becoming part of everybody’s future plans."

Despite the progress made, 86% of government IT officials say that the fact that other countries are ahead in IPv6 adoption will negatively impact the United States in such areas as technological leadership, national security and Internet stability.

Survey respondents overwhelmingly support the creation of a U.S. government IPv6 transition office that would standardize and coordinate the government’s IPv6 transition efforts and define IPv6 milestones beyond 2008. Such an office would be very helpful or somewhat helpful, according to 75% of survey respondents.

IPv6 promises easier administration, tighter security and an enhanced addressing scheme over IPv4. IPv6, which uses a 128-bit addressing scheme, supports a virtually limitless number of uniquely identified systems on the 'Net, while IPv4 supports only a few billion systems because it uses a 32-bit addressing scheme.

Developed a decade ago, IPv6 has been slow to catch on in the United States because U.S. government agencies and companies secured large blocks of IPv4 addresses when the Internet was first invented. IPv6 is more popular in Asia and Europe, where IPv4 address space is scarce.