First, this has the potential of introducing a bottleneck, causing your website to load more slowly in the user's browser or worse, causing connections to be dropped by the LSN device. As the load on LSN devices increases, the problem will be compounded. And second, since all traffic in both directions for a given session must flow through the LSN device, your traffic has only one way into and out of the ISPs network. Think of the Golden Gate Bridge...all traffic must take a single path to the other side.

3. Reliability: LSN devices potentially introduce a single point of failure in the ISP network. The Internet was designed so that traffic can take any number of paths to reach its destination, but since LSN requires all packets in a flow to take the same path through the LSN device as we discussed above, an LSN failure can isolate the ISPs customers from the IPv4 Internet. Continuing with the Golden Gate Bridge analogy, imagine if the bridge was closed for repair, or worse, collapsed.

Now you may be thinking, "These are the ISPs' problems, not mine." And you would be right. However, the ISPs' problems become your problems when the result is your Web site not being accessible to your clients and customers.

So as we can see, even though ISPs are planning on providing a mechanism for maintaining IPv4 connectivity to their IPv6 subscriber base, the effects may be undesirable. To put it bluntly, you simply can't rely on someone else (in this case, ISPs) to do the heavy lifting for you. Only you can ensure your application is accessible to your customer base, whether the customers are on IPv4 or IPv6. And the way to do that is to ensure your application is accessible via IPv4 or IPv6.

So, the world isn't going to end if you don't deploy IPv6 today, but the writing is on the wall. So, where to begin? If you haven't begun your organization's IPv6 transition, don't panic, there are out there to help. And here are a few pointers to help get you started.