They haven't released many details yet, but U.S. carriers say they are developing commercial services that will take advantage of IPv6, a long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol known as IPv4. Many of the new services are due out in the next year, carriers say…

"We've seen commitments by the major telecom carriers. They're going to be IPv6 ready and enabled by 2010," says Jerry Edgerton, CEO of Command Information, a Herndon, Va., provider of IPv6 services whose carrier customers include Verizon and British Telecom. "These carriers are now global players, and so are their customers. IBM just moved its supply chain management to China last year. This globalization factor is going to drive demand to IPv6. If I'm a global enterprise, I need to be compatible with the rest of the world."

The U.S. carrier that is out in front on IPv6 is NTT America, which began offering IPv6 access services in North America in 2003.

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