U.S. carriers AT&T, Comcast and Time Warner Cable were among seven global ISPs that have committed to this deadline, along with some of the world’s most popular Web sites including Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Bing.
“The fact that leading companies across several industries are making significant commitments to participate in World IPv6 Day Launch is yet another indication that IPv6 is no longer a lab experiment; it’s here and is an important next step in the Internet’s evolution,” said Leslie Daigle, the Internet Society’s chief information technology officer, in a statement.
The ISPs participating in World IPv6 Launch have agreed to enable IPv6 for enough users so that at least 1 per cent of their wireline residential subscribers will use IPv6 to visit IPv6-enabled websites. Other participating ISPs include Japan’s KDDI, France’s Free Telecom, Australia’s Internode and the Netherlands’ XS4ALL.
“We’ve seen unprecedented growth in network traffic over the past several years, and IPv6 is critical to the continuation of that growth,” said John Donovan, CTO of AT&T, in a statement released Tuesday. “We’re excited to participate in World IPv6 Launch by enabling IPv6 services for new and existing residential customers in addition to the enterprise customers we support with IPv6 today.”
The participating websites such as Facebook and Google have agreed to permanently enable IPv6 on their main websites beginning June 6. Content delivery networks Akamai and Limelight also have agreed to enable IPv6 throughout their infrastructures by this deadline to enable their customers to support the new protocol in production mode.