While some traditional telecom carriers such as AT&T appear to be dragging their feet on deploying the emerging standard known as IPv6, the U.S. cable industry -- led by Comcast -- is charging ahead on this long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol.AT&T lagging while others lead on IPv6 This progress on IPv6 was evident at a meeting of cable operators and programmers held this fall in New York City that was sponsored by CableLabs, the industry's research and development consortium"We've been working with cable operators really closely for over two years on getting IPv6 ready for deployment," says Chris Donley, project director of network protocols at CableLabs, which has supported IPv6 in its specifications since 2006. "We've been talking about the operational aspects and making sure that the work we did in 2006 is still relevant to their plans."CableLabs has hosted two IPv6 summits per year in 2009 and 2010 for cable operators."There's very strong support for IPv6 within the cable industry," Donley says. "From the largest operators to some of the smallest, this really is industry wide preparation for the IPv6 rollout."