Swedish incumbent Telia looks set be the first to launch a commercial IP version 6 (IPv6) network in Europe, and has said it hopes to have the first service provider customers live as early as July.

Customers can connect to points in either Stockholm, London, Oslo, Kopenhamn, Malmo, Goteborg or Vasa in Finland if the network is lit as planned at a time yet to be confirmed during the third quarter of this year.

"The work with building Telia's new IPv6 network is in full swing, with the first stage already completed in June," said Ove Alm, technical director at Skanova, a wholesale network provider within the Telia group.

Skanova's marketing director Ove Wik told Total Telecom Telia was building a new network for the IPv6 traffic using its own fiber capacity, and would then use gateways to migrate traffic onto it gradually from the main Telia network.

"In the beginning, we're only planning 5 or 6 POPs, so there isn't much of a cost [to Telia] to start," he said, "but migrating the traffic will be much more costly."

In the meantime, the two networks will operate in parallel, and migration will probably take place over a five-year period. Telia aims to build up traffic levels on the IPv6 network, which currently has capacity to support traffic at 100 megabits per second, and then move to Gigabit Ethernet.

"We're looking to work with all the operators we have peering agreements with at the moment," said Wik. London will be pivotal in Telia's plans, because according to Wik, IPv6 traffic cannot yet be interchanged between carriers within the Nordics.

IPv6 brings with it the promise of an upgrade to the current version 4, which looks increasingly-dated because it is limited by a 32-bit IP addressing system which only allows 4.3 billion addresses.

IPv6 uses 128-bit addressing, and its pending commercial deployment in carrier networks is thought to hold the key to supporting the proliferation of devices that need their own IP identity.

"We think over the next year [carriers] will start coming [to market] with their IPv6 networks," Wik said, indicating the commercial momentum that may be gathering behind the protocol.

However, the mass adoption in the industry needed to make IPv6 a success is still some way off. Although Telia is at the forefront, it said it still intends its initial offering to be a fixed-access transport service available to a limited number of users only.

"Apart from operators and Internet service providers, we believe the service will be attractive to R&D companies specializing in products using the IPv6 protocol," said Wik.

Other carriers trialing IPv6 include BT and NTT Europe, Agilent Technologies has recently launched an IPv6 test toolkit, and Cisco has pledged to support the protocol in a wide range of kit from this month.