8/25/2011 -- Don't look now, but service providers are getting serious about IPv6.

Finally.

It's about time. Just six months ago, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) parceled out the last five IPv4 address blocks.

While not all of those addresses are yet in use, it's only a matter of time before all 4 billion IPv4 addresses -- notwithstanding the three private (or non-routable) address blocks -- have been allocated.

That's where IPv6, with its support for up to, er, 340 undecillion addresses, comes in. An overwhelming majority of service providers -- some 83 percent -- have already deployed IPv6 or plan to do so by next year, according to market watcher Infonetics research. Not surprisingly, Infonetics finds, all service providers plan to migrate to IPv6 sooner or later.

"With IPv4 addresses running out in some places in the world by 2012, and as many as 15 billion machine-to-machine [M2M[ devices expected to be connected to the Internet by 2015, each needing its own IP address, IPv6 migration has become a front-and-center issue for carriers," said Michael Howard, co-founder and principal analyst of Infonetics Research, in a statement.

Elsewhere, service providers see both routers and carrier Ethernet switches as a means to accommodate surging demand for video content.

 "Our survey also confirms that routers and Carrier Ethernet switches will be an important part of solving the video traffic problem, especially for providers with broadband subscribers, as 47% of carriers implementing caching plan to move associated routers and switches closer to their subscribers," said Howard.

Video is proving to be a hugely disruptive challenge for service providers.

Most plan to add caching to boost the performance of routers or switches. And while less than two in five (38 percent) of service providers currently use content delivery networks (CDN), half plan to employ CDNs by 2013.
-- By Stephen Swoyer