Survey: Service providers planning diverse approaches to IPv6

Almost every service provider that responded to a recent survey conducted by IP software provider BT Diamond IP has begun deploying IPv6 or has performed an analysis on how to do so. But service providers are making available a wide range of choices in terms of how to implement IPv6, the survey said.

This finding likely reflects the fact that a wide range of service provider types—including residential broadband providers, Internet service providers and others—participated in the survey, said Tim Rooney, director of product management for BT Diamond IP, in an interview.

Different needs drive different choices
The solution that a service provider chooses appears to have been heavily influenced by the type of services offered. For example, a service provider with customers that operate web sites will be concerned with making sure that Internet users with IPv4 or IPv6 addresses can easily reach those customers and accordingly, may implement a dual stack or tunneling solution.

Fifty-nine percent of service providers responding to the survey said they were planning to use some type of dual-stack solution, which essentially uses two parallel pipes to carry both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic and has the intelligence to connect endpoints to the appropriate pipe. Seventeen percent of total service provider respondents said they planned to implement dual stack technology in a “customer-facing” manner, while 16% planned to implement it throughout the network, 14% planned to implement it in the network backbone and 12% planned to use IPv6 over MPLS.

As for tunneling, 5% of service providers said they planned to implement IPv4over6, 3% said they planned to use IPv6rd and another 3% said they planned to use dual-stack lite. Connected Planet has previously covered the attributes of the first two options. The third option requires an update to the customer premises equipment which sets up a tunnel by using an address family translation router in the service provider network, Rooney said.

Thirteen percent of service providers in the BT Diamond IP survey apparently do not serve customers that operate web sites or businesses that need to be reached by IPv6 endpoints, as they said they do not plan to implement IPv6. Of those, 4% said they were concerned with IPv4 address conservation, however, and said they plan to deploy NAT444. As Rooney explained, NAT444 enables multiple IPv4 addresses to be used by multiple customer endpoints.

Perhaps surprisingly, the BT Diamond IP survey found 17% of service providers that said they planned a full IPv6 deployment, including 7% that said they planned to implement either NAT 64 or DNS64—two methods of enabling an IPv6 network to communicate with an IPv4 endpoint. Because the survey did not include a deployment timeframe, however, these service providers mentioning full IPv6 deployments likely are thinking in terms of long-range plans, while those talking about tunneling or dual-stack solutions are thinking of more near-term needs.

The BT Diamond IP study had 587 respondents, including 24% that classified themselves as telecom or network service providers.