The first two laboratories
have recently completed accreditation to provide testing services for
the USGv6 Program. The USGv6 Program, developed at the National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), provides the basis for
expressing U.S. government requirements for Internet Protocol version 6
(IPv6) technologies and for testing that commercial products meet those
requirements. The availability of commercial testing services is an
important step towards the U.S. government’s use of USGv6 acquisition
tools, beginning in July 2010.
The current Internet Protocol (IPv4) provides the basic
communication service that inter-connects the global set of networks
that comprise the Internet. Designed in the early 1970s, IPv4 is rapidly
running out of unassigned, globally unique network addresses. IPv6 was
designed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a
next-generation replacement for IPv4. With a vastly larger address
space, IPv6 will enable the Internet to grow unbounded for the
foreseeable future.
The USGv6 Program is intended to assist federal
government IT users and acqusition authorities by providing a framework
to express and test IPv6 requirements for U.S. government procurements.
ICSA Labs of Mechanicsburg, Pa., and the University of
New Hampshire Interoperability Laboratory in Durham, N.H., were
accredited by private accreditation bodies operating under the
International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation (ILAC). To become
accredited under the USGv6 program, a test laboratory must demonstrate
the quality control processes that insure the accuracy, transparency and
reproducibility of their testing results and must demonstrate their use
of USGv6-approved test methods and test suites. The end goal is to
assure vendors and USGv6 users that the conformance, interoperability
and capability tests performed at one commercial lab are equivalent to
those of any other accredited lab.
“The accreditation of two open test laboratories is a
significant achievement for the USGv6 effort,” noted NIST’s Stephen
Nightingale, who leads the testing program. “The existence of two
accredited labs demonstrates that our test methods and means of
inter-laboratory comparisons and quality control are viable; and in
fact, we expect that additional commercial labs will come on-line in the
future.”
For more information on the USGv6 Program see the
"Frequently Asked Questions" page at www.antd.nist.gov/usgv6/usgv6-v1-faq.htm
Media Contact: Evelyn Brown, evelyn.brown@nist.gov, (301)
975-5661
