What service providers learned from World IPv6 Day

Service providers were hoping yesterday’s World IPv6 Day would be a non-event for them—and that’s what it largely appears to have been.

“We did not see any issues in our network or [any problems] accessing any content sites we didn’t anticipate,” said Richard Von Scherr, director of network integration for Cox Communications, in an interview.

Cox serves about a dozen enterprise customers that participated in the trial as either web site operators or as entities wishing to reach IPv6-enabled web sites. In addition, the carrier had IPv6-enabled some individual end users in an in-house trial of the technology.

The sorts of problems Cox did encounter were relatively minor glitches, such as people being able to access a website operator’s main site, but not some of the individual pages on that site, Von Scherr said.

“We had a detailed test plan that we sent to people who participated,” said Von Scherr. “We asked them to perform certain tasks and will ask them to report back.”

Although the company has not received those reports yet, Von Scherr said he has had informal email conversations with some participants about their experiences, and participants have had few problems to report. For example, one of the factors that Cox asked participants about was whether they experienced greater latency accessing IPv6 sites and, based on informal feedback, they did not.

Von Scherr added that he has had conversations with industry peers, who also said they experienced few problems yesterday.

Amount of tunneled traffic was surprising
Perhaps the only surprise of the day, Von Scherr said, was the amount of tunneled IPv6 traffic that Cox and other participants saw. “It was a larger amount than we were expecting and we saw it across the industry at large,” said Von Scherr.

Tunneling options, which go by names such as IPv6rd, Teredo and IP v 6-to-4 relay, enable IPv6 traffic to be carried across an IPv4 link, usually by installing a client on the customer premises equipment (CPE). (CP: 14 things service providers--and their customers--should know about IPv6)

That result, Von Scherr said, suggests a high level of interest in IPv6 on the part of end users. Von Scherr is hopeful that this result will motivate more customer premises equipment manufacturers to fully support IPv6.

“One of the biggest challenges is getting CPE vendors to debug their equipment,” Von Scherr said. “The data suggests to those vendors that this is a big deal, and we hope it will drive vendors to put more focus on the CPE.”

Von Scherr said problems with specific CPE were well known in advance and Cox worked with participants using that CPE to implement a work-around for IPv6 Day. “But it’s not something you would want to do for a large-scale deployment,” Von Scherr said.

Web site operators experience few problems
Cox did not update its own website to accept IPv6. But service providers that did said they experienced few problems.

Orange Business Services provided IPv6 access to its web site for the duration of World IPv6 Day and, according to Christian Petrus, IPv6 product manager for the carrier, only a few end users experienced difficulties reaching the site. The company also created a dedicated IPv6 page to educate customers about the IPv6 transition.

Neustar also enabled its main web site to accept either IPv4 or IPv6 traffic.
(CP: What service providers should know about World IPV6 Day) Most people had no trouble reaching the site, said Tom McGarry, vice president of the Advanced Technology Group at Neustar. The company, which offers domain name hosting and interconnection services to the telecom industry, uses several Internet service providers for connectivity and one of those providers experienced intermittent IPv6 connection problems. The companies are still working to diagnose the problem, McGarry said.

Neustar also experienced problems with some links on its site that went to other web sites that did not support IPv6, McGarry added.
McGarry said Neustar’s domain name system infrastructure was upgraded to support IPv6 years ago and did not experience problems yesterday. Based on data gathered from that infrastructure, the overall percentage of Internet traffic using IPv6 yesterday continued to be just a small fraction.

But although it’s still a small percentage of total Internet traffic, the amount of total IPv6 traffic saw a big jump yesterday. Internap, a global IT infrastructure provider that uses connectivity to more than 10 major carriers, said its IPv6 traffic jumped 2500% yesterday.