US cable operator Comcast plans to have IPv6 available to all its customers by mid-2013, its Distinguished Engineer & Chief Architect for IPv6 John Brzozowski, told an audience at the Broadband World Forum. Brzozowski said that Comcast’s plan was to deploy IPv6 incrementally, and the priority was to ensure that it would not affect its customers’ experience. “We are not going to die the death of 1000 cuts,” he said.

US cableco Comcast has reported strong progress for its ‘Internet Essentials’ broadband adoption programme in the US, now in its second year, and revealed that more than 100,000 families and 400,000 low-income Americans are now benefitting from the initiative, designed to close the digital divide.

The US Department of Justice has given qualified approval to the US operator Verizon’s plan to purchase wireless spectrum holdings from the four largest US cable operators, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Bright House Networks and Cox Communications. But agreements between Verizon and the cable operators to offer one another’s services must change, the DoJ said, because the plan as hatched “would have harmed competition by diminishing the companies’ incentive to compete.”

The ongoing dispute over net neutrality was dealt a serious blow this week as a US federal court ruled that the FCC does not have the authority to force all service providers to treat internet traffic the same.

  As expected, Clearwire shareholders on Thursday approved the ‘new’ Clearwire joint venture. Comprising Sprint Nextel (51 per cent) and Clearwire (27 per cent) – with the remaining equity held by Intel, Google, TimeWarner Cable, Comcast and Bright House Networks – the new company has ambitious plans to roll out mobile WIMAX across the US. [...]