[vidarh]

If the "CDN" part of it proves to be sufficiently useful, this could be deploy layered on top of IP, or wrapped in UDP or even a TCP connection. Capable clients would then "just" need a means of discovering the nearest capable router that'll let it tunnel. And while IPv6 also can easily be tunnelled, the benefits of doing so are much smaller: IPv6 doesn't give you that much if your host still has an IPv4 address too.

But if this system lets your ISP drop in a new router or two that suddenly can know just by looking at packet headers that it is allowed to returned data from a local cache instead of passing the data on to the server and waiting for a response, then it could have sufficient benefits as soon as a couple of large bandwidth hogs starts supporting it. E.g. if Netflix or Youtube made use of it

That potentially a pretty different proposition.

Then again, the question is whether they need to re-architect the lower level protocols to do this, instead of defining a protocol on top of TCP or UDP that services that are actually likely to benefit can implement.