The Internet Society is organising World IPv6 Launch for 6 June 2012, when participating internet service providers, network equipment manufacturers and other service providers will permanently enable IPv6 on their connections, devices and services. The event is a follow-up to last year's World IPv6 Day. Google internet evangelist Vint Cerf said that he considers 6 June 2012 a turning point in internet history, and that it will create substantially more IP addresses for the internet as well as strengthen the net's end-to-end principle.

Participating internet service providers currently include AT&T, Comcast, Free Telecom, Internode, KDDI, Time Warner Cable and XS4ALL. Several companies – including Comcast, XS4ALL and the French Free Telecom service – already offer IPv6 to many of their internet customers. The announcement said that on 6 June, at least one per cent of each participating ISP's subscribers will be able to access the net via IPv6, and that this will happen largely automatically.

The list of participating hardware manufacturers currently only includes Cisco and D-Link, who plan to enable IPv6 by default on all home routers shipped from World IPv6 Launch Day onwards. Facebook, Google, Bing and Yahoo will also offer parallel (dual stack) IPv4 and IPv6 services from 6 June. Akamai and Limelight customers can add themselves to the list of participants via their CDN providers' infrastructures. Further participation details can be found on the World IPv6 Launch web site

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