Comcast Pilot Testing IPv6 Rollout to Home Cutomers
The transition from IPv4 to IPv6 has been a study in technological baby steps. Even as the world is rapidly running out of IPv4 addresses, ISPs are very slowly working out how to move their customers to IPv6. Comcast has stepped up and become the first major ISP to deploy IPv6 to home customers, albeit only to customers in one town under very specific circumstances. This is going to be a major transition for everyone connected to the Internet, but in many ways it is going to be most disruptive for home customers who are ill-prepared to diagnose how their Internet-connected devices are going to react to the transition. We are all increasingly dependent on the Internet for content, news, entertainment, and communication and the move to IPv6 will be a topic we will all be paying attention to.
Comcast says it will implement support for home routers in an upcoming service update, later in 2011 or 2012. At that point, routers will be able to request a range of IPv6 addresses through DHCPv6 prefix delegation, and then configure that range of addresses on their LAN interface and give out addresses through DHCPv6 or stateless autoconfig.