The widespread deployment of NAT solutions weakened the main IPv6 driving force. While IPv6 still has additional features to IPv4 (like security and mobility support), these were not strong enough to attract a significant amount of companies to develop IPv6 implementations and applications. Consequently, the deployment of IPv6 essentially stalled during this period.
Fortunately, the development of the protocol continued. Several experimental implementations were created and some practical experience gained through to operation of the 6bone network. This led to the revisited set of specifications published in the end of 1998 (RFC 2460 and others).
An important player in the IPv6 field has always been the academic networks, being generally keen on new technologies and not that much interested in immediate profit. Many of them deployed the new protocol and provided it to their users for experimentation. This brought a lot of experience and also manpower for further development.
Probably the most important period for IPv6 so far has been the first years of the 21st century, when IPv6 finally gained some momentum. The increasing number of implementations forced remaining hardware/software vendors to react and to enhance their products with IPv6 capabilities.
The new protocol also appeared in a number of real-world production networks. Network providers in Asia seemed to be especially interested in IPv6 deployment. The reason for this is clear – the Internet revolution started later in these countries, so they obtained less IPv4 addresses and the lack of address space is thus considerably more painful here. In short, the rapid growth of Internet connectivity in Asia cannot be served by the relatively miniscule IPv4 address space assigned to the region. This even led to some governments declaring their official support for IPv6.
The deployment of IPv6 in Europe has been boosted by the Framework Programmes of European Commission. Funding was granted for projects like 6NET and Euro6IX that focused on gaining practical experience with the protocol. Also, the largest European networking project - the academic backbone GéANT – would include IPv6 support once sufficient confidence and experience had been gained from the 6NET project.
The main focus of the GéANT project was to interconnect national research and education networks in European countries. As these networks were interested in IPv6, its support in the backbone was one of the natural consequences. After a period of experiments, IPv6 has been officially provided by GéANT since January 2004.
Euro6IX focused on building a pan-European non-commercial IPv6 exchange network. It interconnected seven regional neutral exchange points and provided support for some transition mechanisms. Other objectives were to research and test IPv6-based applications over the infrastructure and disseminate the experience.
Between 2000 and 2004, the vast majority of operating system and router vendors implemented IPv6. These days it is hard to find a platform without at least some IPv6 support. Although the implementations are not perfect yet (advanced features like security or mobility are missing in many of them), they provide a solid ground for basic usage. Moreover, in most cases one can see dramatic improvements from one release to the next.
All in all, after some years of hesitation IPv6 finally leaves the status of a high-tech extravagance and starts to be a usable tool.