The demands of transmitting large amounts of data, such as video, voice, sound (MP3, etc.) and the increased use of broadband services by optical fiber, CATV and xDSL, are increasingly strangling Internet bandwidth. To give the net some breathing room, Hitachi is now putting support for IPv6 at OC-48c wire-rate into its GR2000 family of Gigabit Routers. GR2000 hardware with IPv6 will be coming to market in September, 2001. The company also announced that GR2000 models supporting IPv6 at 40 Gbps line speed are under development and will be available next year.