Making up for lost time on IPv6.

The official result of the Moonv6 project that ended on March 2004 will be a white paper describing how participants got a varied bunch of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) equipment, networks, functions and applications working together. The unofficial, but more important, result may be a thriving future U.S. IPv6 market, sparked by government and industry working together. Things started to change, at least for service providers, last June 2003. That is when the U.S. Department of Defense mandated that, beginning October 1, 2003, all assets procured for its global information grid be IPv6-capable, with the goal of having all DOD networks running IPv6 by 2008. In the end, it may be a stretch to predict that government initiatives like the DOD mandate, and related efforts like Moonv6, will eventually set off an IPv6 explosion in the U.S.