Federal agencies must support IPv6 on their externally facing Websites by Sept. 30 under an . Although many agencies won't meet that deadline, they are making significant progress on IPv6, industry observers say.

Akamai says that 35 federal agencies that operate 1,200 individual Websites are using its dual-stack IPv6 and IPv4 platform to meet the IPv6 mandate. Akamai's network allows these agencies to accept IPv4 and IPv6 requests from users without having to change their internal platforms.

"We will have an additional 300 to 400 federal Websites dual-stacked between now and Friday the 27th," Schweickert said.

Two years from now, federal agencies must support IPv6 on their internal networks under the Obama Administration mandate. Akamai is working on a new service that will allow agencies to use IPv6 to communicate between their edge and origin servers, rather than proxying this network traffic over IPv4 as it is done today.

"When I talk to public sector agencies in other countries, some of them are looking to mimic the U.S. mandate," Schweickert says. "I definitely see the U.S. as the leader on this front, and I see other public sector customers trying to put similar processes in place in their countries to get IPv6 adoption to increase as well."