Cable giant Comcast announced today on its blog that is has started the pilot market deployment of IPv6 to customers in select markets.
The cableco has been doing IPv6 trials in its production network over the past year, and has actually been working on IPv6 for six years. Comcast claims to be the first large Internet service provider in North America to start deploying the new technology.
Comcast says its technology partners have been very flexible in the trials, willing to take risks to get to this point in a timely fashion. Thousands of employees have played a part in getting this project up and running, the company said.
The first phase of the deployment will support certain types of directly connected customer-premises equipment, where a single computer is connected directly to a cable modem. Subsequent phases in 2011 and 2012 will support home gateway devices and variable length prefixes, Comcast said.
The company's approach is what it calls "native dual stack," meaning customers will get both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. Native dual stack is supposed to avoid breaking or slowing applications and maintains a better and faster broadband Internet experience.
Comcast plans to deploy IPv6 nationally once it discovers and fixes any bugs that come up in the limited deployment.
It was first determined in 1998 that IPv4 would eventually run out of possible addresses – approximately 4.3 billion. IPv6's capacity is a whopping 3.4×1038 addresses.
