So, I thought I’d have a look around at the state of play. So I did a quick search on the ISP that I use from home:

Hmm, my ISP hasn’t heard of IPv6. Could be interesting when they find they can’t sell any more accounts.

So, next I thought I’d look at my (home) router manufacturer to see how it’s going to cope with the change:

Hmm, ok, a pattern is beginning to emerge.

Now I know Vista supports IPv6 out of the box, although my router’s never heard of it and my ISP doesn’t want to know. Here’s my settings:

Well, it looks as if IPv6 a complete waste of disk space, memory, CPU and electricity on my PC.

My understanding is that most IPv6 traffic is tunnelled inside IPv4 packets at present. This does need to change so that IPv4 is tunnelled inside IPv6 instead. However, there could be up to a billion pieces of networking kit that are made obsolete by IPv6. I have no idea what will resolve this. My ISP gives me a lease on an IPv4 address. This address is assigned out of the subset of global IPv4 address that iiNet have been allocated. But it doesn’t have to be. iiNet can just assign out of 10.xxx.xxx.xxx and build a massive NAT router of their own. And this could translate to IPv6.

But why would you bother? It should be much easier to implement IPv6, get the routers upgraded and let Vista (plus Linux and OS X) just talk IPv6.