U.S. vendors have the most IT products that have been approved by the IPv6 Forum's program, which runs conformance and interoperability tests. U.S. companies including , HP and Juniper have run 425 networking products such as routers and hosts through the IPv6 Ready process. This compares to 350 IPv6 Ready products from Japanese vendors and 250 from Taiwanese vendors.

6. Government Leadership

The U.S. government established milestones for agencies to deploy IPv6. In June 2008, they had to . In July 2010, they had to start buying IPv6-Ready IT products. In September 2012, they must support IPv6 on their . While only 42% of federal Websites are making progress on the latest deadline, according to NIST, this is more progress than other nations have made. For example, had operational IPv6 Web service for the Internet Society's World IPv6 Launch Day in June. This represents 8.6% of the Websites participating in that event.

EDITOR'S NOTE: In fairness, the U.S. isn't leading every IPv6 metric. In APNIC's world rankings of nations by the number of Internet users that prefer IPv6 traffic over , the U.S. is fifth, behind Romania, France, Luxembourg and Japan:

Country IPv6 Preference