The company, a subsidiary of Japan’s NTT Communications, will make the announcement at the US IPv6 Summit 2003 conference in Arlington, Virginia, today, following a pre-commercial launch in June.

Verio will offer tunneling, where locations using IPv6 internally are connected with IPv6 tunneled over IPv4, native, where users have a dedicated IPv6 link, and dual stack, where users can leverage Verio’s IPv4 and IPv6 routing tables on the same link.

It’s basically down to the customer’s preference, said Verio director of product engineering Cody Christman. But my opinion is most customers doing this will probably select our dual stack services.

IPv6 IP addresses use 128 bits, compared to IPv4’s 32 bits. So while the total available unique addresses available under IPv4 is about 4.2 billion, the total available under IPv6 is greater than 34 followed by 38 zeroes.

This will, some say, allow the Internet to return to its peer-to-peer roots, doing away with messy address translation standards. And because IPv6 can handle IPSec encryption natively, it may allow communications to be more secure.

Most people believe IPv6 will ultimately carry all of the Internet’s traffic, but when this will happen is open to debate. IPv4 will likely not run out of address space for a decade, but Christman said he expects the transition to IPv6 to occur sooner than that.

The new Verio service includes support for some technologies used in IPv4, including fixed or burstable bandwidth, multi-homing, shadow circuits, BGP, multiple T1s and DNS. The company also plans IPv6-specific services such as a new VPN offering.

Over the course of 2004, we will take every product we offer in IPv4 and offer that in the IPv6 world also, Christman said. There will be additional products we should be able to offer using IPv6.

The US IPv6 Summit, which runs until Thursday, is organized by The IPv6 Forum, and will feature a keynote by Jim Bound, chair of the group’s technical directorate, as well as chair of North American IPv6 Task Force and an HP Fellow.

Also keynoting is John Osterholz, the US Department of Defense’s director of architecture and interoperability. Osterholz announced in June that the DoD will migrate completely to IPv6 by 2008, and called IPv6 the new killer application.

This article is based on material originally produced by ComputerWire.