The Cisco study also projects that 71 percent of all smartphones and tablets (1.6 billion) could be capable of connecting to an Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) mobile network by 2016.

ENGADGET: Cisco: mobile connections will hit 10 billion by 2016, helped by tablet boom

The protocol, which resides on a router at the edge of an IPv6 network, assigns a prefix to each IPv6 address to identify it as a 6to4 address.

CNN: New protocol sneaks IPv6 traffic over the 'Net