Migration headaches
But even with the CPE spec, broadband service providers still have to work out a suitable migration strategy to IPv6, which will take time. "There's plenty of legacy CPE out there, and no carrier is going to swap that out all at once," Mersh says.
He adds that IPv6 migration will inevitably vary between different markets and service providers.
"Every country is different, and every stack of v4 addresses left is different from one region to another," Mersh explains. "That's happening in China, for example, is being driven by a lot of new deployments, a lot of new customers coming into broadband networks, while the same thing isn't true in the US or Europe. So from what we're seeing, coexistence of v4 and v6 is going to happen for a long time."
The Broadband Forum is also working on migration guidelines for broadband operators that take those different scenarios into account. "They're developing a way to have flexible solutions for migration paths, because there's still discussions around things like carrier-grade NATs [Network Address Translators], for example, in the IETF,"he says. "Some people will go down that path. And there will also be some trading of v4 addresses as well, and other carriers will make more aggressive moves to v6."