We are excited to announce that Comcast has successfully activated our first group of cable modem customers using IPv6 in a "Native Dual Stack" configuration. These customers can now access content and services natively over both IPv6 and IPv4, since they have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. As a result, they do not need to use any tunneling or translation solutions including Network Address Translation (NAT); they can access IPv6 and IPv4 directly at high-speed, in an unencumbered fashion.
We are also delighted that these are the first Native Dual Stack users activated in a production DOCSIS network in North America! This is a tremendous milestone for Comcast, cable operators, DOCSIS technology, and the Internet community at large. This achievement is a key demonstration and ongoing test of our ability to offer Native Dual Stack Internet services leveraging our production DOCSIS 3.0 network.
On January 11th, 2011, our first 25 IPv6-enabled users came online in the Littleton, Colorado area. Since then, we have expanded the number of users in Colorado and we will soon expand to additional market areas in other parts of the country. Each user has been delegated an IPv6 /64 block as part of the trial which is comprised of approximately 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 (18 quintillion) unique IPv6 addresses, as a first step as we evaluate what will be the optimal IP address allocation size for our customers. Our trial customers are connected using access network devices (cable modem termination systems and cable modems) from Arris and home networking equipment from Apple, both running publicly available software. We will broaden the trial to include other vendors soon.
For more information about the Comcast IPv6 trials, check out the Comcast IPv6 Information Center.