Belarus becomes the first country in the world to legally require the adoption of IPv6. As of January 1, 2020, all Internet Service Providers will be required to support IPv6 on their network and provide an IPv6 address to all their customers.

 

The new law was promulgated by presidential decree on 18 September. This decree updates the previous one setting out the rules for using the country's "national Internet segment". Belarus has one of the newest and most modern Internet backbones on the European continent and local ISPs have already tested IPv6 support well before last week's announcement.

 

Currently, IPv6 adoption in Belarus is about 15% on average, below the global average (29%). But this is expected to increase from 2020 onwards, as local ISPs will have to support all connections.

Once enabled, clients will be assigned both an IPv4 Internet address and an IPv6 address, and connections will run fully on IPv6 if possible.

 

Officially approved as the Internet standard in 2017, IPv6 was designed to replace IPv4, which has almost exhausted its available address space of 4.3 billion addresses. Since its adoption, ISPs around the world have begun to deploy support, in collaboration with consumer and professional device manufacturers. A rather slow deployment, mainly because it was left to the discretion of the operators.
 

 

 

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Source : ZDNet