Sky put out a press release today which announced the completion (although, later on in the press release, it changed its mind to almost completed) of its IPv6 rollout in the UK (and well timed, too, because the UKNOF35 conference starts in two days)

This is a significant event because they are the first of the “Big 4” ISPs in the UK to have done so, who between them I understand have something like 95% of the market, so Sky’s announcement effectively means that about 25% of the UK’s broadband customers, plus or minus, should now be IPv6 capable.

As for the rest of the “Big 4”, so far, BT’s retail broadband divisions have announced their rollout is in progress but at the time of writing is not very far advanced, and TalkTalk and Virgin Media have continued to stay virtually slient on the matter, though with two of the group in progress, I don’t think they can hold out for much longer.

The only major exceptions I can see is that customers using their own CPE which doesn’t support IPv6 won’t be able to get it, for obvious reasons, and those customers on Sky Broadband Connect (which is a limited product for those people who are on exchanges that Sky has not unbundled) also won’t be able to get it, and one or two old models of Sky router also won’t get their firmware updated to support IPv6.

If nothing else, this is good news for the industry as a whole as adoption of IPv6 by one of the major ISPs means no-one can say it’s a “niche product” or “no-one uses that” any more – because if you are a Sky customer, you probably are using it to access Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc. etc. by now…