The first commercial deployments of IPv6 will take place on June 6, when eleven major telcos, ISPs and web companies make the switch to the new technology.
Firms including AT&T, KDDI, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are among those committed to making the change, which is now essential to the future of web services as current IPv4 addresses dry up. The switch on is being organized by the Internet Society, and follows a successful day-long test of IPv6 in mid-2011.
Leslie Daigle, chief technology officer of the Internet Society, says the commitment of so many big names to the move shows that “IPv6 is no longer a lab experiment.”
Participating ISPs are due to cover at least 1% of their residential customers with IPv6 by June 6.
The move to IPv6 has accelerated in the past year after Asia’s regional internet registry triggered the global allocation of the last blocks of IPv4 addresses in February 2011.