The major driver will be customer demand (read: $$$$), or the network
: Funnily enough, I was reading this only yesterday: : : http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/network/ipv6wv.mspx : : Have a look a the "Business Drivers" section especially. It's just funny numbers: "A recent report from NIST3 estimates that IPv6 could provide a US$10 billion per year benefit to the U.S. and the Japanese government estimates that IPv6 could generate a value of US$1.55 trillion." They give a reference to footnote 3. I searched footnote 3 (www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/network/ipv6wv.mspx) for the word trillion and only get one match: "The 128-bit address header in IPv6, in contrast, provides approximately 3.4x1038 addresses, enough to assign trillions of addresses to each person now on earth or even to every square inch of the earth’s surface." So, to segway into pet peeve of mine, this is the reason to allocate very large (for example: allocation of IPv4 /8 blocks to everyone that asked in the not so distant past) blocks of v6 space. Heck, no one will EVER need that much IP space! <8-) Show me the money, not funny numbers... scott Oops, I forgot: beer :-)