Comcast says it expects to complete its transition to IPv6 in 2012, and is currently recruiting customers to participate in the IPv6 trials, which will start in April, 2010. According to a news report on Network World, Comcast has been working on IPv6 development for the past five years.
“Comcast will test three IPv6 transition mechanisms:
“Phase one will use 6rd, a technique developed by French ISP Free that allows for rapid deployment of IPv6 by tunneling IPv6 traffic over IPv4 addresses.
“Phase two will support native IPv4 and IPv6 traffic running side-by-side in an approach dubbed dual-stack. This is Comcast’s preferred method of transition to IPv6 and may require the carrier to reclaim unused blocks of IPv4 addresses from other network operators.
“Phase three will test a technique developed by Comcast called Dual-Stack Lite, which uses network-address translation to share one IPv4 address among many customers.”
