The European Union is supporting a number of IPv6 related Research and Development activities, which account for over 90 Million Euros of funding, with an matching funding from European industry. While IPv6 is now widely deployed in the European research networks, and many good initiatives have been made — including IPv6 over power line communications and new IPv6 Multicast methods — commercial deployment is only just starting. In this paper we review the European research projects, future networking trends and the commercial deployment status in a number of member countries.