By Tom S. Noda
Computerworld Philippines
March 25, 2010

Realizing the benefits that can be derived from using Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), the Philippine government has created a policy draft to promote the technology’s deployment and usage in the country.

An Internet layer protocol for packet-switched Internetworks, IPv6 is referred to by several organizations as the next generation Internet protocol version – designated as the successor to version 4 or IPv4.

But unlike IPv4 which uses only 32-bit address space that can accommodate about four billion IP addresses, IPv6 uses 128-bits which translates to trillions of IP address capacities. 

Based on the policy draft released by the Commission on ICT (CICT) to Computerworld Philippines, the executive order seeks the creation of an Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) to ensure its implementation.

The task force shall be under the command of the CICT chairman with senior level officials from the Department of Science and Technology (DOST), Department of Trade and Industries (DTI), Defepartment of National Defense (DND), Department of Budget and Management (DBM), the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) as well as private sector representatives as members. 

IATF shall create an Inter-Agency Technical Working Group (IATWG), composed of government and private sector representatives. CICT shall serve as secretariat of the task force who will only cease to operate once all agencies have reported full compliance and that Internet-based network and service providers are IPv6 compliant. 

Among some of the functions of IATF on IPv6 include the formulation of an IPv6 roadmap, management of IPv6 data collection; development of baseline and metrics for measuring IPv6 usage and its benefits in the country; promotion of human capacity building including training and awareness on IPv6; development of a database of IPv6 compliance that shall me made available for use by broadband providers, entities and local government units.

Denis Villorente, director of the Advanced Science and Technology Institute (ASTI) of the Philippines, said with the approval of the policy, the next administration scheduled in June 2010 could also make use of it as a solution to the IPv4 exhaustion and gain national benefits for the country. ASTI is a research and development institute under the DOST.

The policy draft’s creation was derived from the series of CIO forums conducted by CICT as well as with the latter’s engagement with APNIC, ASTI and the local academe.

BUSINESS CONTINUITY ISSUE
According to Miwa Fujii, senior IPv6 program specialist of the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), who served as speaker in this morning’s IPv6 forum held at CICT in Quezon City, the IPv4 problem has now become a “business continuity issue.”

Miwa reported there is only 9% of IPv4 addresses remaining which shows the latter to be a finite resource while the demand for more IP addresses keeps on growing.

“The remaining 9% of IPv4 is not enough and IPv6 is the best solution currently available for this problem,” Miwa said, adding IPv4’s depletion could finally happen by year 2012 or 2014.

“The usage of IPv6 is limitless and even non-computing devices such as aircons and cars, can be given IP addresses,” Miwa claimed.

And quoting a report by APNIC, Miwa said using IPv6 will enable the Internet to continue to grow to millions of times of its present size while avoiding adding a level of complexity that would increase costs to network administrators.

Meanwhile, Villorente announced that ASTI is just waiting for funding from the DOST as to the opening of the local IPv6 laboratory which will be open to organizations that want to test IPv6 equipments and where more trainings for IPv6 engineers can take place.

Villorente said ASTI has always been an IPv6 advocate since the late 1990s by being involved with the AI3 and SOI-Asia project of the WIDE Project of Japan.

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By Tom S. Noda
Computerworld Philippines
January 22, 2010

A “ray” of hope still shines for the legislation of the pending cybercrime and Department of ICT (DICT) bills in the Senate, and it’s no other than Ray Anthony Roxas-Chua III, chairman of the Commission on ICT (CICT) – as he remains optimistic of the approvals, despite only six session days remaining for the legislative calendar.

Chua reported that while the DICT bill interpellation was postponed until Monday, the Cybercrime bill was finally introduced on Thursday. He vows to continue pushing for the approval of the bills until the last session day in the Senate.

The CICT chief is overwhelmed by the support coming from different ICT groups in the country and expects them to rally behind him again on Monday’s session. Groups present in the Senate last Thursday came from the leadership and members of the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPA/P), Call Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP), Game Developers Association of the Philippines (GDAP) and the CIO Forum. CICT’s commissioners were also present to respond to interpellations.

“We hope more groups will continue to support us in the last six remaining session days.  Each bill will have to be approved on the 2nd and 3rd readings and reconciled with the House versions in a bicameral conference within that span of time,” Chua said.

Since Jan. 18, Chua vowed to attend until the last session day of the Senate and has been calling for public support especially through his Facebook account, where we would regularly post developments at the sessions.

Chua expressed fears that if the ICT bills don’t pass in the Senate, lawmakers would have to start from scratch in the next administration.

CICT’s existence is said to be “fragile” since it was only created through an executive order (EO) by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in 2001. The next president can easily remove it if it does not become a department.

Arroyo, in her last state of the nation (SONA) address last July, called for DICT’s creation in order to further improve the local BPO and tourism sectors in the Philippines. It is a development that has been clamored for almost eight years already.

Senator Edgardo Angara recently told Computerworld Philippines that the conversion of CICT into a government department is “a must” in order to have focus on the issue of policy direction of related government agencies such as the Department of Science and technology (DOST), Telecommunications Office (Telof), National Telecommunications Commission (NTC), and National Computer Center (NCC).

According to a recent study by research firm Ovum, the creation of a DICT in the Philippines could rally the local ICT economy around a maximum of four capability areas, they are medical and legal transcription, engineering, software-as-a-service (SaaS), including building businesses around open source technology.

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By Tom S. Noda
Computerworld Philippines
July 27, 2009

“Let us have a department of ICT (DICT)!” was President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s clear command in her last state-of-the-nation address (SONA) on Monday to sustain and improve further the local BPO (business process outsourcing) and tourism sectors in the Philippines.

Speaking over a live nationwide TV broadcast at the House of Representatives, president Macapagal-Arroyo directly dedicated her message to congressmen, for the country to finally have a DICT. It is a development that has long been clamored for in the past seven years.

The president gave the order after stressing how the local BPO sector in the Philippines performed well against global recession. She said unlike the electronics industry, the BPO sector proved to be resilient with the ongoing global economic crisis.

“In the past if the electronics sector grew, today we’re creating wealth by developing the BPO and tourism sectors as additional engines of growth,” Macapagal-Arroyo said. “Electronics and other manufactured exports rise and fall with the state of the world economy but BPO remains resilient.”

She noted that with earnings of $6 billion and employment of 600,000 “the BPO phenomenon stays eloquently of our competitiveness and productivity.”

The president cited that from year 2008 to 2009, the Philippines remained to be “the only country among Asian economies that didn’t shrink.”

“According to Moody’s [Manual], our state of the nation is a strong economy,” Macapagal-Arroyo said.

She added her administration is the only one in Philippine history that invested three times more than any administration on technical and skills training, benefiting present professionals on the voice and non-voice BPO work such as medical transcriptionists.

The president also included in her SONA that her administration is now taking action on calls against telecommunications firms about the missing cellphone loads of subscribers.

“I am asking the national telecommunications commission to take action on calls against missing cellphone loads,” she said in Filipino.

However, the president expressed celebration with the 2010 automated poll project of the Commission on Elections (Comelec), which was legislated by congress almost 10 years ago in December 1997 through the enactment of Republic Act No. 8436 or the Election Modernization Act, authorizing Comelec for the first time to use an automated election system.

“The 2010 automated polls. We got it! Thank you Congress!” the president said.

Macapagal-Arroyo’s DICT request to congressmen signaled her approval for the transformation of the current Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT) into a full-blown department, manifesting a command to congress to approve the pending DICT bills. CICT’s existence is only under the executive order (EO) of the president.

Senator Edgardo Angara, head of the Congressional Commission on Science and Technology and Engineering (COMSTE), said in past interviews that the conversion of CICT into a government department is a must in order to have “focus” on the issue of policy direction of related government agencies such as the Department of Science and technology (DOST), Telecommunications Office (Telof), National Telecommunications Commission (NTC), and National Computer Center (NCC).

CICT chairman Ray Anthony Roxas-Chua III, earlier denied that there would be a “bloating of the bureaucracy” once the commission becomes a department, saying there will just be a merger of existing agencies.

“We’re not even asking for an additional budget. But what we’re expecting is a synergy of the agencies to focus on areas that needed attention,” he said.

Roxas-Chua said another concern on why CICT needs to become a department is that the commission’s existence is fragile since it only relies under the president’s order or EO.

“We’re only under the president’s EO and the next administration can always dispose us anytime they want to,” he said, adding there is less than a year to go before the 2010 national elections.

He added CICT currently lacks people for its projects due to rationalization, and Telof with its 4,000 employees will certainly be a big boost in their manpower needs.

“The Telof with its 4,000 people also has regional offices, but due to the advancement of mobile technology their relevance is slowly decreasing,” Roxas-Chua said.

According to a recent study by Ovum, the creation of a DICT in the Philippines could rally the local ICT economy around a maximum of four capability areas such as medical and legal transcription, engineering, software-as-a-service (SaaS), including building businesses around open source technology.

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By Tom S. Noda
Computerworld Philippines
March 11, 2009

The Advanced Science and Technology Institute (ASTI) of the Philippines is recommending the creation of a public IPv6 laboratory to solve the “problem within the problem” in the issue of global IPv4 exhaustion, which is the lack of trained professionals in the IPv6 arena.

ASTI director Denis Villorente told Computerworld Philippines that ASTI has made a proposal to the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) to grant funds for the establishment of an IPv6 lab that is open for public use. ASTI is a research and development institute under the DOST.

“Through this IPv6 lab, anyone who wants to study IPv6 will be given the resources needed to set up their own test bed,” Villorente said, adding the facility would help in the creation of IPv6 experts who will support the migration of IPv4 to IPv6.

As early as 2007, reports declared 2010 as the year when the world would run out of IP addresses using IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4). Another major problem is that people who know how to do the migration are only a few, Villorente said.

In the recent 2009 Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies or APRICOT2009, held at the Sofitel Philippine Plaza Manila, ASTI officers explained that migration from IPv6 is needed since it is the only way in which IP addresses can be increased.

Compared to IPv4—that uses only 32 bits for IP address space—the IPv6 has 128 bits, which translates to “trillions” of IP address capacities. This means all devices can have their own IP address that would allow direct communication with one another without having to pass through a network.

Peter Banzon, division head of ASTI, said the funding required for the IPv6 lab amounts to about Php5 million to Php10 million.

“The lab’s function would be big since it will be part of a DOST project for the creation of one laboratory for all research institutes in the Philippines,” Banzon said.

Banzon said the proposal is still under evaluation but expressed confidence that it will be approved within this year.

Aside from the creation of experts in the field of IPv6, Banzon said the public IPv6 lab would also help in the making of IPv6 products as well as new applications for the next generation Internet.

Villorente added ASTI has also agreed with the Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT) to convene an IPv6 working group in order to come up with an IPv6 roadmap for the country.

The recent APRICOT conference had a total of five hands-on workshops conducted over the first five days of the event. Among the topics were VoIP, network management and NOC, IPv4 and IPv6 routing, network security, and advanced routing.

“This year’s APRICOT meeting helped a lot in the development of local engineers since world-class trainers gave hands-on exercises to local participants,” Villorente said. “Usually, these kinds of trainings are only available abroad.”

Villorente said one of the highlights of the APRICOT meeting was in the marketing of the neutral internet exchange that ASTI is managing, and a lot of local networks were able to learn about the existence of the Philippine Open Internet Exchange (PHOpenIX).

He added ASTI also conducted in the conference the TEIN3 (TransEurasia Information Network Phase 3) project launch for the Philippines as ASTI is now promoting more active use of this network by its research and education community.

Villorente said ASTI has always been an IPv6 advocate since the late 1990s by being involved with the AI3 and SOI-Asia project of the WIDE Project of Japan.

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