Liberty Global is teaming with Benu Networks to support the MSO’s transition to IPv6 using a dual-stack approach.

Liberty Global will head that way using Benu’s IPv6 Dual-Stack (DS-Lite) solution, using the vendor’s Virtual Service Edge (VSE) platform, which provides a software-managed approach at the CPE level, as the foundation.

Liberty Global and Benu have also teamed with Arris on the design, integration and deployment of the IPv6 solution.

They said the transitional approach with dual-stack will pivot Liberty Global to IPv6 without interrupting its legacy use of IPv4.

ISPs around the world are migrating to IPv6, and its massive pool of IP addresses, as the IPv4 pool depletes. Comcast polished off its IPv6 dual stack network deployment in 2014.

RELATED: ARIN: IPv4 Free Pool Runs Dry

The dual-stack approach, they said, will help the operator move to IPv6 without requiring any public IPv4 addresses to be assigned to the CPE. It also enables support of IPv6 traffic in the ISP core network, they said.

Liberty Global, an investor in Benu Networks, initially purchased the vendor’s Virtual Service Edge platform to support its community WiFi service, and for a Static IP virtual CPE solution for its business customers.

RELATED: Liberty Global, Arris Join Benu's Backers

If you don’t have an IPv6 strategy that’s already in place or at least well downstream, you’re in big trouble.

The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) announced Thursday that the free pool for IPv4 addresses has reached “zero” following the issuance of its final addresses.

ARIN, president and CEO John Curran said in a blog post, will “continue to process and approve requests for IPv4 address blocks, and approved requests can be filled out via the Wait List for Unmet IPv4 Requests or via the IPv4 Transfer Market.

“Effective today, because exhaustion of the ARIN IPv4 free pool has occurred for the first time, there is no longer a restriction on how often organizations may request transfers to specified recipients,” Curran noted. “If we are able to fully satisfy all of the requests on the waiting list, any remaining IPv4 addresses would be placed into the ARIN free pool of IPv4 addresses to satisfy future requests.”

Many U.S. network operators have been preparing for this day by transitioning to IPv6 and its virtually unlimited supply of addresses. ARIN has been issuing warnings about IPv4 depletion for years. 

According to Akamai’s just-released Q2 2015 State of the Internet report, cable and wireless/mobile providers drove the largest volumes of IPv6 requests – Verizon Wireless (71%); T-Mobile (44%), Comcast (37%), AT&T (35%) and Time Warner Cable (18%). On a global basis, Belgium’s IPv6 request volume to Akamai led with 38%, followed by Switzerland (23%), the U.S. (19%), Peru and Germany (17%), and Luxembourg (14%).

For its part, Comcast announced in July 2014 that its broadband network has been fully deployed to support IPv6 dual stack connectivity, a milestone that factored in as the pool of IPv4 addresses inched toward depletion.

John Brzozowski, fellow and chief IPv6 architect at Comcast Cable, blogged today that the ARIN announcement is “not the beginning of the end” but “just the end of the beginning.”

“The news comes as no surprise, but it will force companies and organizations worldwide to accelerate their transition to the more robust, secure and modern version of the Internet protocol, IPv6,” he wrote.

Regarding Comcast’s IPv6-facing work, he noted that the MSO now has “tens of millions” of cable modems being managed using IPv6-only lltoday, and that less than 5% of cable modems on Comcast’s network now rely on IPv4. Cable's widely deployed DOCSIS 3.0 platform supports IPv6. 

Additionally, more than 70% of Comcast broadband subs (residential and commercial0 are actively provisioned with IPv6 support today, and that “well over 15 percent of Comcast’s Internet traffic is over IPv6.”

All of Comcast’s products and services are geared for or will soon be geared for IPv6. For example, X1, Comcast’s next-gen, IP-capable video platform, is migrating to IPv6, he said. 

Comcast announced Tuesday that its broadband network has been fully deployed to support IPv6 dual stack connectivity, a milestone that factors in as the pool of IPv4 addresses continues to run dry.

Comcast was 75% of the way there as of last November, noting at the time that it had completed IPv6 rollouts on Arris cable modem termination systems (CMTSs) over a year prior, and was in the process of implementing v6 support on its base of Cisco Systems uBR1000 CMTSs.

“The deployment of IPv6 is a critical step in supporting the growing needs of the Internet, as IPv4 resources, engineered and brought to fruition over 30 years ago, continue to dwindle due to the explosion of devices hooked into the global network,”  John Brzozowski, a Comcast fellow and the cable unit’s chief IPv6 architect, announced in this blog post. “The deployment of IPv6 is also a necessary step as the ‘Internet of Things’ - devices that leverage a broadband infrastructure in order to think and function - continues to rise, and as next generation network technologies, like IPv6 Segment Routing and Service Function Chaining, begin to take shape.”

Brzozowski said Comcast is making plans to extend support for IPv6 to additional residential devices, as well as the launch of IPv6 capability for business customers. “In addition, Comcast continues to leverage IPv6 across the entire product and service portfolio, with IPv6 only support planned for both the Xfinity X1 platform and Xfinity Voice, with trials slated for later this year," he explained.

Comcast, he added, has also launched IPv6 support for several NBCUniversal digital properties, including nbc.com, nbcsports.com and universalstudios.com.

The MSO has also achieved a traffic milestone, recently crossing 1 Terabits per second of “Internet facing, native IPv6 traffic,” Brzozowski added, citing contributions from Google, which has enabled YouTube streaming to be dual stack-enabled by default.

The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), which manages Internet number resources for the U.S., Canada, and many Caribbean and North Atlantic islands, has been keeping close tabs on the accelerating burn rate for v4 addresses.

ARIN said “Phase 4” of its IPv4 countdown began in April 2014, meaning that one /8 equivalent address block remains.

Brzozowski has also been advocating the CE industry to adopt v6 in smart TVS and other IP-connected devices, and has been chairing the Consumer Electronics Association’s IPv6 working group since the organization founded it in 2011.

Most wired and wireless network operators have IPv6 transition plans underway, but just a small percentage of them are IPv6-ready, according to a study from device provisioning and IP address and bandwidth management firm Incognito Software.

Incognito, which polled 51 cable, wireless and wireline operators from around the globe for its “IPv6 Readiness” survey, found that about ¾ of the group are planning or actively transitioning to IPv6 as the pool of IPv4 addresses continues to run dry. But only 14% considered themselves IPv6-ready, while roughly 35% were in the planning stage, and 10% had not even started their transitions, according to the survey.

Meanwhile, fewre than 4% of the network operators identified as completing IPv6 adoption have begun to offer IPv6 to end customers.

The level and pace of adoption was not uniform, with 34% of those surveyed with IPv6 work underway saying they expect to complete their rollout within a year, while 33% of the group said they expect to wrap up adoption within two years.

About 83% of those surveyed that do have IPv6 plans underway said the biggest driver is the dwindling pool of IPv4 resources, while 40% cited a lack of trust in the Network Address Translation (NAT) protocol, which allows multiple devices to connect with the same Ipv4 address, and 30% identified long-term costs as a big driver for IPv6.

Among the top challenges, half put customer premises equipment upgrades at the top, while educating customers ranked as the second most formidible hurdle to IPv6 deployment.

Most operators surveyed – nearly 90% -- said “dual stack” deployments, whereby IPv4 and IPv6 run parallel to each other, is their preferred method of adoption. Incognito said that’s not a surprise given the high number of IPv4-enabled devices on the market now.

“Investing in a robust IP address management solution is important for operators who need to stay up-to-date on existing IP assignments and available addresses – especially for those who are using dual-stack methods to complete their deployments – so they can both attract new subscribers and anticipate potential conflicts before they cause serious issues for their existing users,” Incognito president and CEO Stephane Bourque, in a statement.

Incognito conducted its IPv6 Readiness survey last fall via email and social media channels that included LinkedIn and Twitter. Of the 51 accepted respondents, 43% were based in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region, followed by North America (31%), Latin America (14%), and the Asia Pacific (12%). According to Incognito, 47% of the surveyed group were cable operators, 19% were wireless service providers, 14% were wireline operators, and 2% were satellite. About 33% of those surveyed served subscriber bases of more than 1 million.