Comcast has enabled IPv6 functionality on its entire Arris C4 CMTS footprint, completing a process begun the middle of last year (“Comcast achieves IPv6 milestone”).

Comcast is not only one of the world’s largest video distributors, it is also one of the world’s largest ISPs. As such, the company has been among the most aggressive companies when it has come to testing and deploying IPv6 technology. The transition to IPv6 is necessitated because the fund of IPv4 addresses is approaching exhaustion.

“Over the past two years we’ve worked closely with our customers to plan IPv6 feature support for our C4 CMTS portfolio,” said Todd Kessler, Arris VP, CMTS product management.  “We’re thrilled to see the success that Comcast has had using our products, first in their IPv6 customer trials, and now across their entire C4 CMTS footprint.”

The National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) recently published guidelines for deploying IPv6.  “The migration to IPv6 services is inevitable as the IPv4 address space is almost exhausted. IPv6 is not  backwards compatible with IPv4, which means organizations will have to change their network  infrastructure and systems to  deploy IPv6,” NIST says in the guide.

Implementation is not without some risk, the organization noted, and that’s why it published its guidelines. “IPv6 can be deployed just as securely as IPv4, although it should be expected that vulnerabilities within the protocol, as well as with implementation errors, will lead to an initial increase in IPv6-based vulnerabilities,” according to the NIST document.

Arris noted that operators can choose the manner in which they utilize IPv6 with the C4 CMTS, including cable modem management and dual-stack CPE behind the cable modem. Its C4 supports a broad set of IPv6 features including options for the IPv6 Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP), Prefix Delegation and Prefix Stability, and many others – all of which the company said operate at scale.