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Time To Buckle Down And Start An IPv6 Project: Page 2 of 2

Some companies will have to adopt IPv6 sooner than others also based on where they operate, adds Dell's Joshipura. The federal government faces an IPv6 mandate in the U.S., while mandates apply to all organizations in China, Japan and South Korea.

Wider adoption of IPv6 presents one of those "chicken-and-egg situations," says Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer for ISOC.

Content providers don't see the point of providing production-quality IPv6 access to their content if there are relatively few users who they can reach over IPv6, Daigle says. Meanwhile, ISPs don't see the point in providing IPv6 services to their customers unless there's actually content that's available over IPv6.

"We're trying to untie that Gordian knot and basically get a number of content providers and service providers and the hardware manufacturers upon whom the service providers depend to jump into the swimming pool all at once," she explains.

IPv6 day 2012 is not just a one-day event to promote IPv6, as was the case last year, but it's the date by which several high-profile committed participants will be offering IPv6 as part of their regular service. Key members of ISOC are service providers such as AT&T, Comcast and Time Warner Cable in the United States and counterparts abroad, home networking equipment vendors such as Cisco Systems and D-link, and major websites such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft Bing and Yahoo.

ISOC also has a website called Deploy360 to help businesses plan and implement an IPv6 migration. Among the items on the site are this humorous take on running out of IPv4 from Cisco.

Part two of this series will look at how to deploy an IPv6 network on top of an existing IPv4 network.

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