Laurentian University in Ontario announced in April that it was the first campus in Canada to convert its website to IPv6. The university published a list of Canadian colleges that had not implemented the new protocol and maintained a blog detailing the steps to converting to IPv6.
Georgian College, an institution with three campuses in Canada, is on its way to adopting the new protocol, a college IT official said during a presentation at the IPv6 Summit at the University of Ottawa in April.
Georgian IT staff set out to convert to IPv6 within three months.
Steve Benoit, Georgian College’s IT manager, said campus technologists found they didn’t need entirely new equipment to leave the old web protocol, according to a May 3 report from IT World Canada.
“We found out that a lot of our stuff was [IPv6] capable. We just needed to configure it and understand it,” Benoit said during his presentation. “As we looked at our stuff, we already had IPv6, the edge router was v6 capable, the DNS server popped up an [IPv6] address, it was totally coincidental.”
Georgian College officials did not respond to a voice mail left by eCampus News.
Benoit said he first had to make sure the campus could maintain an IPv6 connection. Georgian IT staff checked with their internet service providers to see if they offered IPv6 – a process many American colleges and universities might start as the new protocol becomes mandatory.
Higher education has been “earlier on the IPv6 adoptions curve” than many in the business world, said Ed Horley, co-chair of the California IPv6 Task Force, which has raised awareness of the transition from the depleting number of IPv4 addresses and offered strategies for switching to IPv6.
Moving away from IPv4 to IPv6 could become profitable for colleges and universities that have had to trim operation budgets in recent years, he said.
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