The main driver for IPv6 deployment is the IPv4 address space exhaustion, caused primarily by fast growth of residential users.

Each residential user needs an IP address, a small company doesn’t need anything more and even a reasonably-sized company can survive with a few IP addresses.

One would expect the vendor readiness to follow this pattern, but the situation is just the opposite: while the enterprise networking devices have pretty good IPv6 support (Data Center components from some vendors are a notable exception), the vendors serving the residential market don’t care.

The Service Provider-related IPv6 challenges are covered in my Market trends in Service Provider networks workshop. You can attend a web-based tutorial version or we can organize a dedicated workshop event for your team.

It’s amazing how unprepared the residential vendors are: only a few of them offer IPv6-capable DSL CPEs or low-cost routers (make sure you read the whole thread). When faced with the lack of IPv6 feature support, some vendors even have the nerve to hint that you should use a public-domain firmware instead of their own.

The situation is no better in the 3play space: try finding a set-top box running IPv6. Oh, and all devices in the path should support wire-speed IPv6 multicast which is needed to deliver the video stream to set-top boxes.

Realistically, I’d expect most of the 3play solutions staying within the IPv4 address space for a long time; they’re commonly using private IP addresses, so they are not affected by the IPv4 public address space exhaustion.