Ittechtips.com’s Blog

I’ve updated my brief on the efforts of commercial service providers (SPs) to launch their efforts to integrate IPv6 into their networks. Last posting, we looked at a list of 23 large, well-connected SPs, and found that all 23 have obtained IPv6 prefixes. That is an early step on IPv6 deployment, but requires little real effort on the part of the service provider - it just requires a few forward-looking engineers to go and obtain the prefix.

Now we start to look at deployment indicators that take more effort. In this paper, we follow-up on those 23 providers, and see how many are announcing their prefixes onto the IPv6 backbone. We find that 15 of the 23 providers have taken another step - annoucing their prefix to the world.

One last reminder. Providers that are announcing their prefix may be doing so from a small lab, with no production users (announce a /32, have a single /64 with one router and a PC on it). Others may have large deployments, and many production users. A provider that is not announcing their prefix may have a large, internal deployment - perhaps preparing for production services - and have chosen to “cloak” their efforts by announcing their prefix as a last stage in their deployments. This is a provider than wants to keep the timeline between when it is apparent they have an advanced IPv6 capability quiet until they are close to customer availability.

Morale: It is difficult to tell, looking at the “provider shell”, how advanced (or modest) their IPv6 capability is - we can only infer and make guesses.

Read the “Service Provider IPv6 Adoption - Part 2 - Prefix Announcement” brief.