Backbone Provider Deployment Well-Advanced
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010
IPv6 deployment has come a long way in the last year or two. Periodically, I make a little informal survey of the state of deployment, and I wanted to share these results. In blog entries to come I will do the same for Broadband providers and other organizations of interest.
These providers were taken from the “Wikipedia Tier-1 Network” (for IPv4) entry, which I am using as a proxy for “big backbone providers.” I have added “Hurricane Electric” because of their long and deep involvement in IPv6 deployment, and Command Information – not a provider really – where I work and which also specializes in “all things IPv6.”
Figure 1 - Backbone Provider IPv6 Status
What’s interesting here? A number of things, I think, including:
- Of these 13 providers, all have IPv6 prefixes assigned.
- A low bar – it is not difficult – nor does it require much investment – to obtain a /32 prefix.
- Of the 13, 12 are announcing their IPv6 prefix.
- This is a higher bar – it suggests a complement of IPv6-savvy engineering talent at the provider, although the provider could have a “thin” internal IPv6 deployment.
- In terms of “Upstream” peer ASNs, most (all but Savvis) have good diversity (3 or more) (Hurricane has 10).
- A yet higher bar –providers peering with other providers is another indication of the depth of their IPv6 deployment and a preparatory step for carrying production IPv6 traffic.
- In terms of “Downstream” peer ASNs, some have a significant number (35 or more).
- These may be paying customers or other cooperative organizations.
- Note Hurricane Electric with 476 downstreams – this is partly a result of their liberal peering policy for IPv6 and their tunnel-based peering infrastructure. NTT, for example, or Global Crossing are likely to have a higher proportion of “high quality” (paying) customers downstream within their count. Hurricane has many paying customers, but also many tunnel-based small peers.
- NTT posting impressive numbers as well - another provider with a long-standing commitment to IPv6.
- Of the 13 providers, 6 have enabled IPv6 transit on their DNS servers.
- This is significant in several ways – but mostly I use it as a proxy for the *depth* of IPv6 capability and progress within a provider. This means that IPv6 has moved beyond the core engineering team and into other parts of the organization and other competencies.
- Of the 13, 2 have IPv6-enabled main websites (NTT has IPv6-enabled “www.ntt.net”).
- No surprise in not being a “Yes” here. Few large organizations have enabled their “main services” for IPv6. Google, for example, runs “ipv6.google.com,” rather than having dual-stacked www.google.com (for the masses – Google does have their DNS whitelist server and that is a terrific offering), and no Internet-based user is likely to be running IPv6-only today (especially with no provision for IPv6/IPv4 translation). Still, my hat is off to providers who have pushed IPv6 so deep into the organization that the main online business site is IPv6-ready.
So, big picture, I think this confirms what we have an innate sense of – big IP backbone providers are actively building out their networks, enabling their support services, and moving IPv6 outside the main engineering groups and deeper into the organization. This is also the case with many broadband ISPs (as we will see next time). Soon after broadband ISP deployment will come the major content and media providers (Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Bing, etc.) and then enterprises – especially enterprise Internet-facing sites. Adoption will be uneven – that is leading enterprises will deploy before some lagging providers – but these deployment waves are already shaping up. Where are you in your deployment? I would enjoy hearing from you on your experiences with IPv6 deployment in your organization - please comment. Thanks for reading.


