For those of us wanting to see IPv6 deployed, yesterday brought the great news that Comcast has started rolling out its IPv6 production network to customers.
Now, granted, the initial rollout was to only 100 homes in San Francisco's East Bay. It is also restricted to a single computer directly connected to a Comcast cable modem. This initial rollout did not support home routers which are typically found for WiFi in many/most homes these days.
Still... it's a start!
The experience Comcast gains with this initial rollout will only help them with wider rollouts and the inclusion of home routers.
Kudos to Comcast for this start of their IPv6 rollout... I'm looking forward to hearing of other service providers starting their IPv6 deployments! (Time Warner, I'm talking about you! :-)
UPDATE: Comcast has now come out with two of their own blog posts on this topic:
- Deployment of IPv6 Begins by Jason Livingood
- Technical Details for Our IPv6 Deployment by John Brzozowski
Notice in particular this great part to the technical piece:
It is also important to note that we are deploying native dual stack, which means a customer gets both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses. That means we are not using tunneling technology or large scale Network Address Translation (NAT). Using a tunnel introduces additional overhead compared to not using one (native IPv6), as your traffic must traverse a relaybefore going to the destination and back. And NAT technologies rely on two layers of NAT, one in your home (in a home gateway device), and one within a the service provider's network that usually shares a single IPv4 address across possibly hundreds of customers or more. Using NAT presents many challenges compared to not using NAT, as your traffic must traverse a NAT device before going to the destination and back. In addition, we believe those two layers of NAT will break a number of applications that are important to our customers.
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