Comcast says its entire network will support IPv6 by the end of 2012.

"What we're really talking about is enabling high-speed data," Brzozowski says. "We've made sure that everything we designed, developed and deployed could support IPv6 at scale. Everything had to be the same with IPv6 as with IPv4. We couldn't put IPv6 in our customers' hands that was below par."

BACKGROUND:

Comcast's IPv6 service for home networking users is the latest in a series of IPv6-related announcements that the company has made in the last five months.

In a somewhat controversial move, Comcast is giving each of its home networking users what's called a /64 block of IPv6 addresses, which represents more than 18 quintillion IPv6 addresses or . This is a massive amount of IP addresses for techies to ponder given how long they've functioned in the address-constrained mode of IPv4.