OMB says agencies will comply

Karen Evans, administrator of the Office of E-Government and Information Technology in OMB, says that she expects all federal agencies to meet the IPv6 deadline.

"We have no reason to believe that agencies are not going to meet the deadline," Evans says. "Based on everything they have been reporting to us and how the process is supposed to work, there is no reason for the agencies not to be able to demonstrate compliance with IPv6."

Evans said 10 cabinet-level agencies have submitted the required e-mail to OMB from their CIOs stating that they have successfully transmitted IPv6 packets. Evans expects to receive similar e-mails from 14 other cabinet-level agencies in the next few days.

"They've done the work; they just need to send in the notification to OMB to validate the work that's been done," Evans says. "This doesn't mean I'm in a panic because I haven't received the form from 14 agencies. This is normal. We track [IPv6 progress] on a quarterly basis...We have no reason to believe that we won't receive the other notifications."

Evans says no federal agency has notified OMB of having failed to pass IPv6 packets successfully over the backbone network, and no federal agency has asked for an extension beyond June 30.

"It's a huge accomplishment for all of us to make the deadline," Evans says. "Agencies had to buy IPv6-compliant hardware, put the services out there and properly implement them so that they can run IPv6 across their backbones."

Even more important to the Bush Administration is the fact that the US federal government met its IPv6 deadline without a huge influx of cash.

When the federal IPv6 mandate was being considered, some IPv6 marketers said the US federal government needed to spend upwards of US$10 billion on IPv6 transition. OMB proved them wrong. Instead, the US government is migrating to IPv6 through its regular tech refresh budget with some minor additional spending in training and network engineering.

"We're going through this transition based on the life cycle of our IT investments," Evans says. "The infrastructure that agencies were buying already have IPv6 capabilities.... If we had done this as an after-thought, then it would have been a huge cost....We're transitioning to IPv6 in a very concerted way."