Vyatta, a San Mateo, Calif.-based company that makes open source router software and router hardware says it has raised $11 million in Series B funding with Comcast Interactive Capital leading the round of financing. Previous funders – JP Morgan Partners, ComVentures and ArrowPath Venture Partners also invested in this round.
The company has raised a total of $18.5 million so far. The investment indicates that cable carriers are getting serious about chasing the small and medium sized businesses, and competing with the telephone companies in more than just consumer markets. Our previous coverage of Vyatta.
Disclosure: Vyatta founder Allan Leinwand is a guest columnist for GigaOM.
Interesting – Comcast is also the only North American or European cableco/telco I know of that has already deployed IPv6 in its core, and is planning to roll out IPv6 to all households due to its projected need for 100 million IP addresses. It’s already used up the whole of 10.x address space and is onto public IPv4 space, hence the move to IPv6.
Searching for ‘comcast durand ipv6′ will find a useful presentation. AsiaPac is already big on IPv6, particularly China and Japan. All serious routers have IPv6 available, and all host OSs from XP onwards have IPv6, so it’s really just a matter of turning it on in the network, i.e. operational expenditure not a capital investment. I think that Triple Play and the need to really manage the home network actively (e.g. remote access to set top boxes for tech support) will drive IPv6 over next 3-5 years.
Always dangerous to make IPv6 predictions, as it’s been 3 to 5 years out for at least 10 years, but I believe it’s starting to happen. Would be interested to hear from others whether agreeing or not.
Back on topic somewhat – Vyatta is a little behind Cisco and Juniper on its IPv6 support, I think, based on Feb 2007 of experimental IPv6 support. That won’t matter in short term – I’d be more interested in its strategy for ATCA, which promises to massively commmoditise all sorts of telco kit, not just routers but big iron switches as well as next-gen kit for IMS, VoIP, etc.