The Internet Society is organizing a pow wow of big ISPs, web companies and networking equipment providers on June 6 to ceremonially bury the world’s current Internet protocol, IPv4, and permanently implement its successor, IPv6.

Global broadband providers AT&T, Comcast, Free Telecom (which has been very much in the news of late), KDDI, Internode, Time Warner Cable and XS4ALL will form the ISP contingent; Cisco Systems and D-Link will represent the equipment makers; and Facebook, Google, Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo will make up the Web delegation. According to a statement from society chief Internet office Leslie Daigle:

The fact that leading companies across several industries are making significant commitments to participate in World IPv6 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. And, as there are more IPv6 services, it becomes increasingly important for companies to accelerate their own deployment plans.

Of course, the Internet Society won’t just flip and switch and convert the world to longer IP addresses, but the organization said it wanted to build on last year’s World IPv6 day, by rather theatrically marking the permanent transition of some of the world’s biggest IP properties to the new protocol. The broadband ISPs have promised that by June 6, 1 percent of their residential customers will be accessing the websites, where possible, via IPv6. Cisco and D-Link will make IPv6 the default settings for their home routers, and the websites will permanently enable the protocol on their main webpages. Akamai and Limelight will also recruit other websites to join the initiative, by implementing IPv6 throughout their content delivery networks.

Image courtesy of Flickr user ADoseofShipBoy

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For the last few years, an alternate wireless network has been emerging in the U.S.; one not built by the mobile operators but by cable providers. Cablevision, Time Warner Cable, and Comcast have all launched numerous Wi-Fi hotspots in their service areas, and last week Bright House joined the club, turning on 2,000 outdoor and indoor hotspots across the state of Florida. The Multiple Service Operators (MSOs) have latched onto the idea of Wi-Fi as a way of extending their home and business broadband services to customers on the go, and its paying dividends. Why haven’t their mobile counterparts followed suit?

Apart from AT&T, U.S. mobile carriers have been slow to adopt Wi-Fi in their networks. Verizon Wireless only began limited use of Wi-Fi hotspots in big public venues last year. Meanwhile, Sprint and T-Mobile have been content to let their customers take advantage of the plethora of free Wi-Fi in the public domain, they haven’t launched any hotspots of their own. Even AT&T is being fairly conservative. It makes extensive use of use of the café/restaurant/airport network it acquired from Wayport to offload mobile data traffic, but it has only built outdoor networks extensively in New York City. In the rest of the country, AT&T’s outdoor access points are limited to handful of high-profile, high-traffic “hotzones” such as Chicago’s Wrigleyville and San Francisco’s Embarcadero.

Time Warner's Los Angeles WI-Fi network

In comparison, Time Warner’s Wi-Fi coverage of Los Angeles is a dense mass of polka dots covering major intersections, parks and public venues from downtown all the way to Santa Monica and snaking down the coast to Redondo Beach. The MSOs have even expanded their reach by signing network-sharing deals with each another, creating the cable equivalents of roaming networks. Wi-Fi has proven to be tremendously popular with their customers, who get to access the networks for free as long as they’re home cable modem subscribers.

The obvious answer as to why mobile carriers haven’t been as quick to pull the trigger the trigger on Wi-Fi is that they don’t need it from a geographic standpoint. Their networks already cover every conceivable area they could hope to reach with Wi-Fi, so the business case for carriers isn’t coverage; it’s capacity. As more customers consume more network resources, they place tremendous loads on the network’s high-traffic zones.

Many international operators have already gotten wise to the benefits of Wi-Fi for cheap data offload, probably none more than Free.fr, which is building its Free Mobile unlimited and data service on the back of 5 million Wi-Fi “nano cells” embedded in the set-top boxes of its broadband subscribers.

If you’re looking for an example closer to home, Republic Wireless is signing hotspot deals to create a “Wi-Fi first” service that, allowing it to offer unlimited voice and data for a mere a month. Republic acknowledges that it’s service is still experimental and it’s not sure if it can make its unlimited business case viable, but if it weren’t for Wi-Fi, it wouldn’t be able to make the attempt.

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Time Warner Cable has developed an app for Panasonic Viera TVs, making it the first operator to bring cable TV content to the platform. The app was being shown off in the Panasonic booth, along with other content providers.

For Time Warner Cable and other operators, TV apps are one way to provide more value to subscribers and to make more streaming content available than what they have in their traditional VOD libraries. And for consumer electronics manufacturers, these type of apps provide more content that their consumers can access on the devices.

Last year at CES, Time Warner Cable announced plans to build apps for Sony and Samsung broadband-connected TV sets. However, those apps have yet to materialize, it’s not clear when the Panasonic app — or Time Warner Cable apps for any other CE device — would make it into the market. TWC Director of Digital Communications Jeff Simmermon told me by email that the company would like to launch apps sometime this year across multiple platforms, but didn’t have any launch timing to share.

Time Warner Cable is just one of many cable operators looking to build connected TV apps. Samsung, for instance, was showing apps from Comcast, Verizon and DirecTV in its booth at CES. A representative said those apps would show up on its platform later this year.

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We’ve been talking about initiatives with the potential to change how we watch TV and now, one of them is finally ready to launch. We spent a lot of time going over Microsoft’s new dashboard for the Xbox 360 and what it could, but probably won’t, do to the market. Of course the folks in Redmond aren’t the only ones with something to show as we also cast an eye towards new iPad apps from Dijit and Cox, as well as the possibility we’ll see DirecTV’s HR34 Home Media Center DVR this week. Other topics include the cable companies getting out of wireless, Lovefilm switching from Flash to Silverlight, and Time Warner’s tablet app arriving on Android. As usual we close out with our picks of what to watch this week, so press play and see if you agree with our choices,

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00:03:09 – Xbox 360 Dashboard update review (fall 2011)
00:03:50 – Xbox 360′s new video services won’t all launch right away; Comcast, Verizon, and HBO Go delayed
00:12:15 – Xbox Companion app for WP7 will launch alongside the new dashboard December 6th
00:39:00 – DirecTV’s new five tuner HR34 Home Media Center DVR ready to launch December 8th?
00:45:29 – Hands-on with Dijit’s universal remote app for iPad
00:51:07 – Cox TV Connect app brings more live cable TV streaming to iPads
00:55:00 – Time Warner Cable’s tablet app available for Android, live TV streaming still iPad only
00:53:56 – BBC brings global iPlayer iPad app to Canada, one step closer to the US
00:55:09 – Lovefilm’s movie streaming will switch from Flash to Silverlight on PCs in 2012
00:57:53 – Verizon scores new spectrum from Comcast, Time Warner and Bright House for .6 billion (update)
01:00:29 – Kogan advertises Samsung LCDs in its HDTVs, Samsung would rather not take credit
01:02:09 – Lenovo trudging into the smart TV arena, plans LeTV launch in Q1 2012 (update: aka IdeaTV)
01:04:39 – Must See HDTV (December 5th – 11th)

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Engadget HD Podcast 277 – 12.06.2011 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 06 Dec 2011 10:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Much of the discussion about Internet Service Providers centers around the nation’s largest players in the telecommunications and cable fields, but there are a number of smaller ISPs and it’s worthwhile to talk to them to discover how competition is faring in the U.S. and what might happen if more flourished. Royster Tucker, the COO of North State Communications, an ISP serving a 600-mile area in North Carolina highlighted the importance of fiber to the home, but also indicated that metered billing isn’t just for the big guys.

Fiber is the future, and North State is on board.

North State, which includes Greensboro in its service area, began deploying fiber to the home in 2009 because it was losing out to the cable companies with its DSL-only option. Tucker declined to tell me how many customers it currently has, but he says that it’s now the No. 1 provider of broadband in a region that includes Time Warner Cable and AT&T as well as smaller cable companies. “We said we want to be the broadband market leader and the way to do that late 2009 was with fiber to the home,” Tucker said.

Now North State offers an 80 Mbps down/30 Mbps up for consumers at a 12-month introductory price of a month, which is about what I pay for 12-13 Mbps down/ 2Mbps up cable broadband from Time Warner here in Austin. However, the most popular package North State sells is a 30/30 Mbps symmetrical package, although he did not disclose penetration or take rates. Tucker also noted that the company is still supporting its 10 Mbps DSL business in its service area, but he doesn’t plan on making more investments in the technology. “Back in 2003 and 2004 and 2006 we were out there shortening loop lengths, building out fiber to the node and all that, but now we’re going to stick with maintenance,” Tucker said.

To cap or not to cap? That is the question.

North State doesn’t currently have a broadband cap as Tucker believes the fiber network can withstand the speeds that today’s traffic requires. However, Tucker says, “We believe ultimately that is the direction the broadband market will go.” When pressed on the subject, Tucker says, “As over-the-top video becomes more and more prevalent and there’s more HD and bigger broadband requirements, the broadband market will move to some kind of cap or metered service.”

However he couldn’t explain precisely why this would need to happen. “The networks are expensive. We are providing bandwidth for all these wonderful things that are showing up on the Internet and that is costly,” he said. “This market is highly competitive and we have to get some money from somewhere to pay for these networks. All of it is not falling on the user.” But when asked if his financial models could support the delivery of more traffic he said that, “in a multi-product scenario, yes it does. We look at the whole household and the revenue we’re getting out of the households.”

When I asked if that meant North State could only recover costs and make money off a user that subscribed to multiple services, Tucker appeared to backtrack. A user that subscribed to broadband alone would suffice, he said. He then implied that part of the issue around capping was because some people use so much more than others. “All the rich content that’s showing up on the Internet is driving tremendous demand on our network, and we want our customers to have access to that.” He continued, “There are those that are more bandwidth-heavy users, and we need to strike a median on who’s paying for what, and that’s where we see that capping may come in.”

However, Tucker was very clear that North State wasn’t capping service now — and that it may never cap or meter service. However, one could hear the amazement in his voice when we discussed what people were doing over the network.

“I don’t think anyone could see what we would drag across these pipes, and people thought the unlimited model would be fine,” Tucker said. “But this is evolving and it’s something that we’re all having to deal with. We’re a broadband company and we want people to do what they want to do, and we want to deliver value to our shareholders.”

As people consume more bandwidth, it may well be smaller ISPs such as North State that are answering to private shareholders in highly competitive markets, that show us exactly what networks are capable of, both in terms of technology and in delivering profits.

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DSL is on the ropes, and cable companies are seeing their broadband numbers rise, according to data on broadband sign ups during the second quarter. Leichtman Research Group found that the top 18 providers in the U.S. acquired about 350,000 net additional high-speed Internet subscribers in the April-June period. Net broadband additions in the quarter were the second fewest of any quarter in the ten years LRG has been tracking the industry.

That’s pretty significant. It means that new subscribers are hard to come by, so gains for providers will come from the competition — and so far cable and fiber products are the winners there. For every consumer that added service from a telecoms provider, cable providers added three. The top cable broadband providers have a 56 percent share of the overall market, with 8.9 million more subscribers than the top telephone companies – compared to 7.85 million this time a year ago.

But all is not lost for telecom companies — at least those that are upgrading to fiber. AT&T and Verizon added 628,000 fiber subscribers in the quarter (via U-verse and FiOS), while losing 578,000 net DSL subscribers. No wonder Time Warner Cable’s CEO thinks broadband is his company’s future and AT&T’s CEO says DSL is obsolete.

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