A while ago (a year?) I wrote about my attempts to get an IPv6 address block and start using IPv6. My carrier, Verizon, did not seem to know what I was talking about.

Today, in Government Computer News comes this:

"There isn't a lot of demand for IPv6," said Daniel Awduche, a Verizon business fellow, speaking as part of an IPv6 panel at the MPLS 2008 Conference being held this week in Washington ( GCN )

File this under the category of things that make you go hmmm. Clearly there is a serious disconnect when a senior member of the company says “Yeah, we do that” and the front line sales force says “Nope, never heard of it.” It leaves the customer in the lurch wondering who is telling the truth.

And it is not like IPv6 is a new thing. Oh, sure, it is getting a lot of press right now as the US government is in a push to convert their system to it (we are still wondering exactly why, but that is a different discussion since the hardware and software at the end nodes is not now, and will not be anytime soon, ready to handle it), but it has been around and functional for at least 10 years and certainly, in countries outside the United States, deployed widely, at least as a common carrier on the backbone.

So I come back around to my initial head scratching question. Is there not a lot of demand because people are not adopting the new protocol, or is there not a lot of demand because people are being told their carrier does not support the protocol.

It should not be too hard to guess which camp I am in.