"We saw our IPv6 traffic increase around 400% this year and 1,000% since last June," Brzozowski says.

Although IPv6 remains below 1% of Comcast's overall traffic, it peaked at around 6% of traffic during the Summer 2012 Olympics. This was a result of YouTube streaming video from the Olympics to Comcast customers over IPv6.

Brzozowski says the biggest challenge to IPv6 usage in the United States is and other electronic gear such as TVs and gaming systems, which need to support IPv6 by default.

"When one of our customers starts using IPv6, up to 40% of the traffic in and out of their home is IPv6," Brzozowski says, adding that the bulk of IPv6 traffic that Comcast sees is driven by YouTube, Netflix and the iTunes App Store. "Once IPv6 is on the home , a lot of IPv6 starts to get consumed."

Comcast is focused on providing IPv6 to its residential broadband customers right now, but starting next year it will give its business customers IPv6 by default in order to help drive enterprise usage of the new protocol.