Comcast is first U.S. ISP to offer IPv6 to home gateway users

12.04.2012

"With our customer home networking service, you take your home of some variety, plug it into the back of our cable modem, and now you have IPv6 in your home," Brzozowski explained. "On any device - your , your Mac, your tablet - you now have native dual-stack service to the Internet."

is a looming upgrade to IPv4, the Internet's main communications protocol.

IPv6 is needed because IPv4 is running out of addresses to connect new users and new devices to the Internet. IPv6 solves this problem with a vastly expanded address space, but it is not backwards-compatible with IPv4. So ISPs like Comcast have to upgrade their routing, edge, , and customer premises equipment (CPE) to support IPv6. The alternative is for carriers to translate between IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, which adds latency and cost to network operations.

Upgrading a network as large as Comcast's to support IPv6 is "non trivial," Brzozowski says.

Comcast has been working on its IPv6 deployment for seven years, starting with the ability to manage its own network devices using IPv6, then migrating the company's internal network to IPv6, and now deploying IPv6 to all of its residential customers in a seamless, non-disruptive manner.