I've been watching the Google IPv6 conference from a few weeks ago and one of the panelists made a fascinating suggestion: It's always been tough to see what would get Internet Service Providers to go through the pain of deploying IPv6 to the edge, i.e. to their customers. After all, few of them have IPv6-capable routers and their support people would have to be brought up to speed; there are a hundred problems I could cite.

But in a few years the IPv4 address will run dry. At that point, addresses will only be available in aftermarkets which don't yet exist (eBay perhaps?) If costs for addresses get high enough, ISPs would do well to give away IPv6-capable hardware to their customers in order to sell them a far cheaper IPv6 address. It's sort of the way that mobile phone companies sell new phones at great discount or even give them away, because then they get to sell you new services for them.