Category: v6launch

Jun 06

Facebook Moving To An IPv6-Only Internal Network

In a brilliant presentation by Facebook’s Paul Saab at the recent v6 World Congress in Paris, he outlined how Facebook is well on the path toward moving to an IPv6-only internal network. He makes the point that why should you deal with the headache of maintaining a dual-stack (IPv4/IPv6). Instead just move your internal network to be IPv6-only and then have dual-stack devices on the edge of the network to interact with the legacy IPv4 Internet. You can download a copy of the slides (and view commentary in the IPv6 Group on Facebook) to read all about the process, but here’s the key summary slide 31:

fb-internal-ipv6

Those statistics are:

  • 100% of  hosts they care about respond on IPv6  (Hosts that are not IPv6 ready are going away.)
  • 75% of internal traffic is now IPv6 with a goal to be at 100% by Q3 2014 or earlier
  • 98% of traffic in and out of HHVM is IPv6
  • 100% of our memcache traffic is IPv6
  • A goal of being 100% IPv6-only in 2-3 years

Very impressive to see!  Paul’s presentation is worth viewing because he outlines the challenges that Facebook faced from dealing with vendor equipment to getting developers to use IPv6.  It’s a great case study that we’ve added to our IPv6 case studies page.  We wrote about this presentation back in March, but it’s worth repeating today on World IPv6 Launchiversary #2.

Facebook very clearly understands the need to move to the production version of the Internet – and they are taking steps to ensure that their site and services will be available to the next 5 billion people who come online!  They are going to be out in front of most other companies with having made the transition over to IPv6.

What are you waiting for?  Visit our “Start Here” page or  check out our IPv6 resources  – and let us know if there is anything more we can do to help you!

Jun 06

Verizon Wireless Passes 50% IPv6 Deployment!

To all the doubters out there saying IPv6 ”will never happen”, on this World IPv6 Launchiversary let us just point you to the latest World IPv6 Launch measurements that show Verizon Wireless being the first of the top 10 largest networks to cross over the 50% IPv6 deployment mark!

Over 50% IPv6!

Verizon Wireless 50% IPv6

…as measured by Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Akamai. That’s a remarkable achievement – and if you look at the rest of the top 10 you’ll see that other networks are not far behind.  As our colleague Mat Ford writes, IPv6 measurements are going “up and to the right”!

IPv6 deployment IS happening.

We are moving on from the “experimental” version of the Internet to the “production” version.  The smart companies are already making the move. Where are you?  If you haven’t already started deploying IPv6, now would be a really good time to start!

Congrats to the team at Verizon Wireless for all the IPv6 they have enabled with their LTE network – we are looking forward to seeing this percentage grow, and to seeing other networks join them in crossing this milestone!

Jun 06

Vint Cerf: We Need To Move To The Production Version Of The Internet (IPv6)

We need to stop running the experimental version of the Internet and move to the production version of the Internet running IPv6!  This was one of the key points made by Vint Cerf in a Google+ Hangout back in April 2014.  We wrote about the event then, but today on World IPv6 Launchiversary it is definitely worth sharing again.  As Vint notes, when the Internet was first being created, it was always a grand experiment.  Many of the folks involved thought that at some point we’d leave the “experimental” Internet behind and move to the “production” version… but yet many people haven’t yet made that leap!  Vint asked everyone to contact their Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and ask when they will be able to get IPv6… and we’d ask you again to please do that today!

The interview with Vint Cerf covers a wide range of topics about the Internet… if you have some time it’s a great video to watch.  And then… if you haven’t yet moved to the production version of the Internet, please visit our “Start Here” pages to find out how you can get going with IPv6 today!

Jun 06

Check Out The New 2-Year World IPv6 Launchiversary Infographic!

Today in celebration of the second anniversary of World IPv6 Launch, there is a new infographic available that talks about what has changed with IPv6 since June 6, 2012.  You can find it at http://www.worldipv6launch.org/infographic/ or by clicking the image below.  Please do share it with people to let them know how millions of people around the world are now able to communicate over IPv6!

UPDATE: You can now also download a PDF version of the 2014 infographic if you would like a version for printing or sharing as a PDF.

wipv6l2-infographic-partial

Jun 06

Mexico’s AXTEL Provides Excellent IPv6 Lessons Learned And Recommendations

What are the key lessons AXTEL, Mexico’s second-largest telecommunications operator, learned in deploying IPv6 across their network?  What did they do?  What do they wish they’d known before they got started?  In an excellent case study we’ve published from AXTEL this week, they walk through the phases they went through in planning their deployment of IPv6 and then get into their lessons learned and recommendations. Their slides are available for viewing:

AXTEL IPv6 case study cover image

As far as the lessons they’ve learned, their “In Retrospective” section states that if they could return to the beginning of their IPv6 project, they wish they could have had:

  • More insight regarding how each of our different equipment providers were doing towards their evolution to IPv6.
  • The possibility to talk to another provider that had already implemented IPv6 in their network and learn from their experiences.
  • Support from our providers with people/team that had hands-on experience in an IPv6 evolution project.
  • To have had IPv6 support, even years before the beginning of the project; as a required functionality in all or our network and IT equipment requirements.

The advantage to people starting now is that there are examples of service providers who have implemented IPv6 and there are people who other service providers can speak with.  To that point, Cesar Joel Ramirez Garcia, an author of this case study from Axtell, said in a message that he’s glad to receive questions from other network operators about what they’ve done.

In the case study they go on to provide their recommendations for other companies seeking to move to IPv6:

  1. Communicate to all company levels the urgency and importance of IPv6 evolution.
  2. IPv6 is a primarily a business continuity case.
  3. Test in a lab environment all your IPv6 deployment scenarios
  4. Begin IPv6 training in all the different technical, sales and marketing teams ASAP.
  5. Evaluate the necessity of running a network audit or assessment to know where your network stands regarding IPv6.
  6. Join in technology forums and ask other people about their experience in the IPv6 evolution.
  7. Work closely with your equipment providers.
  8. Implement double stack wherever possible.
  9. Avoid NAT techniques wherever possible.
  10. Don’t be afraid of the IPv6 transition; as with many things the beginning is the toughest part.

These are great recommendations and we certainly commend Cesar and the rest of the AXTEL team on the work they have done so far as well as the work they are continuing to look at about how to expand IPv6 further in their networks.  Now that they have business and VPN customers using IPv6 they are now looking at the best ways to get IPv6 connectivity to all their residential customers.  All of that will help Mexico move ahead in having an Internet that will work even better in the future as more people and devices come online!

What are you waiting for?   If you would like to join AXTEL and many other service providers with moving to the production Internet, please visit our IPv6 resources or begin with our “Start Here” page to help find resources most appropriate for your type of organization.

Congratulations, again, to AXTEL for both their deployment of IPv6 as well as their willingness to share their story so that others may learn! Thank you!

Jun 03

Why And How Did RCS&RDS, Romania’s Largest ISP, Deploy IPv6?

Romania IPv6 usageWhy did RCS&RDS, Romania’s broadband market leader, deploy IPv6 in their network?  How did they do it?  What did they have to do?  And what were the results they saw?

In this excellent case study provided to us by Liviu Pislaru, the Chief Architect for IPv6 for RCS&RDS, he answers all of those questions and much more.

I want to pull out a couple of specific points, in particular his answer to why they did this:

The trigger for IPv6 deployment wasn’t IPv4 depletion. We still have plenty of IPv4 addresses and this is gold nowadays. We wanted our engineers to gain experience with IPv6 when the size of the IPv6 internet was less the 1% and chances to affect customer services was minimised.

They went ahead now because they knew that sooner or later they would need to make the transition… and wanted to get the experience before it became critical for them to have it.  As Liviu notes, they were ready for World IPv6 Launch in 2012 and rapidly became one of the leaders globally in IPv6 adoption.

Now, for people looking at this today, the global IPv6 Internet has already grown past 1% by any of the statistics sites such as Google’s IPv6 stats… but Liviu’s point is a good one – NOW is the time to gain the experience before you need to do so!

Liviu notes how much traffic they now see over IPv6:

Nowadays our IPv6 traffic goes to 30-35G in peak time, mainly because there’s more IPv6 content on the Internet. Our measurements show that 25% of a dual stack residential customer traffic is IPv6 traffic.

This is consistent with what we’ve heard from other ISPs (some of home have even said higher values such as 40%) and makes sense when you realize that many of the sites that home users would visit are all IPv6-enabled, such as all of Google’s properties (including YouTube), Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Bing, Netflix and more.

While they had great initial success in 2012, the rate of IPv6 adoption has not climbed greatly in Romania and Liviu gets into some of the reasons he believes this hasn’t happened. He also provides a link to a site where you can monitor the status of IPv6 on RCS&RDS’ network.

All in all it is an excellent case study and I would strongly encourage you to read it! Thank you to Liviu for providing us this case study and for all of his hard work there in Romania bringing about this great level of IPv6 deployment!

Interested in more stories of IPv6 deployment?  Check out our IPv6 case studies page – and if you want to get started with your own transition to IPv6, look at our “Start Here” page to find IPv6 resources most appropriate to your type of organization.

Jun 02

Case Study: How Romania’s RCS&RDS Deployed IPv6

The following IPv6 case study was contributed by Liviu Pislaru from RCS & RDS.

RCS & RDS is one of the most important telecom operators in the region, providing telecommunication services in different european countries. In Romania, it is the market leader for broadband and TV services and the only quad-play provider.

When it comes to IP/MPLS backbone and services, we have a “do it yourself” business model and that helped us a lot with IPv6 deployment from different perspectives:

  • we have an open minded management responsive to new ideeas
  • we have very experienced engineers with a complete knowledge of the network setup
  • we react quickly to network design and software changes

Meet The IPv6 Protocol

In July 2003, we got our first IPv6 allocation from RIPE, a ::/32. Three years later, we set up our first IPv6 peerings in AMSIX, without even having IPv6 enabled in backbone. We did that 2 years later following some basic rules:

  • we kept the IPv6 routing standard simple and similar to IPv4. we used the v6 version of the configured protocols.
  • we took good care of “IPv6 next-header/routing header” issues. source-routing in IPv6 is a bad ideea
  • we tried not to mix Dual Stack with 6PE, especially on BGP RRs (route reflectors) as there are so many issues/bugs with IPv6 next-hop even on major vendors core routers

In 2009, we extended our peering sessions to DECIX, LINX, VIX, we set up peering sessions with Google and we got IPv6 global routing table from upstream providers. We built our first allocation plan in 2010, following “nibble boundary rule”, meening a network mask which aligns on a 4-bit boundary (/n, where n is evenly divisible by 4) and returned to RIPE the ::/32 for a ::/28. When “World IPv6 Day” started, on June 8, 2011, we had already activated IPv6 in backbone, we had already configured hundreds of IPv6 peering sessions in different IEXes but we didn’t have any IPv6 customers. We decided is time to stop talking and start acting.

IPv6 Trial for Residential Customers

The trigger for IPv6 deployment wasn’t IPv4 depletion. We still have plenty of IPv4 addresses and this is gold nowadays.

We wanted our engineers to gain experience with IPv6 when the size of the IPv6 internet was less the 1% and chances to affect customer services was minimised.

We wanted our engineers to gain experience with IPv6 when the size of the IPv6 internet was less the 1% and chances to affect customer services was minimised. RCS & RDS is an organization with a well managed IPv4 network with modern hardware and we faced relatively few costs in deploying IPv6, mostly centered around manpower.  We’ve studied all transition mechanisms and decided to take advantage of our linux based BNGs with PPPoE and implement an IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack. We hoped and still hope we’ll be able to offer dual-stack to all our customers until the size of the IPv6 internet will be big enough so the carrier-grade NAT (“CGN” – NAT44 for example) that unfortunately we’ll be forced to introduce someday, will translate a very small amount of traffic. We built up “v6team”, with a few  highly skilled engineers from different cities in Romania, whose first goal was to give IPv6 to every residential customer. The PPP encapsulation allowed us to avoid all layer 2 related issues and the distributed linux based BNG system gave us a lot of flexibility.

The main challenge was the lack of IPv6 support on customer-premise equipment (CPE). We needed IPv6 via PPPoE (IPv6CP) and DHCPv6 with prefix delegation (PD) and decided to modify and existing open-WRT/ Tomato image to support what we needed and then ask CPE vendors to do the same with their firmware. At that time, our residential customers were buying their own CPEs from the shelf and it was very important giving them a list of CPEs that support IPv6 via PPPoe and DHCPv6 PD. We also gave them the open-WRT/ Tomato modified images but unofficialy because we didn’t want to offer software support for a CPE not provided by RCS & RDS.

On October 10, 2011, we announced in a press release an “IPv6 Pilot Project” start-up and in six months more the 12.000 customers had enrolled. A third of them actually succeeded connecting with both IPv4/IPv6.

rcs-rds-1-450

The idea was simple and was based on ServiceName field in PPPoE client. For those that entered the string ‘ipv6test’ as a servicename the server responded with both IPv4 and IPv6 Link Local that was created based on IPv4 address (fe80::<32 bits in hex from ipv4>). IPv6 Link Local address forced on customer’s CPEs / PCs gave us the possibility to allocate to all the customers from the same BNG the ::/128 IPv6 global from one single ::/64 and another ::/64 for each customer via DHCPv6 PD. We decided to do that because we relied on IPv4 logging/tracking system at that time and that saved us a lot of time. Now we have a different logging/tracking system for IPv6 as well and we give each residential customer a ::/64 + a ::/56 via DHCPv6 PD.

One month before World IPv6 Launch we successfully ended  the pilot project and started offering IPv6 to every single residential customer without them even knowing it, simply by ignoring ServiceName field and providing both IPv4/IPv6 to everyone that supported it (negotiate IPCP/IPv6CP) . To get an idea about our IPv6 traffic, in Romania we offer high speed broadband access (50Mbps, 100Mbps, 500Mbps and 1Gbps) for more than 1.5 million residential customers.

On June 6th 2012, World IPv6 Launch, RCS & RDS had the highest IPv6 adoption rate among ISPs worldwide, placing Romania also in the first place according to APNIC & Google public measurements.

IPv6 adoption rate in RCS & RDS network right before World IPv6 Launch:

  • March 2012: 0.2%
  • April 2012: 0.98%
  • May 2012: 9.55%
  • June 2012: 18.6%

The source for these numbers is http://labs.apnic.net/ipv6-measurement/AS/8/7/0/8 and the image below is a printscreen from this website on June 6th, 2012.

rcs-rds-2

Our own measurements show a bit smaller numbers because we are counting the numbers of clients and APNIC and Google are looking at IP addresses. One dual-stack customer usually has and use more then one device and that means only one public IPv4 address but more public IPv6 addresses.

The IPv6 traffic was also big that time mainly because most of it was Google and we had our DNS servers in Google’s whitelisting program. As it can be seen the graphs below, 75% of our IPv6 traffic was CDN and 95% of the CDN was Google.

rcs-rds-3

The rest of the traffic was from peering sessions and I would include here Akamai as well because they weren’t prepared to deliver IPv6 traffic from their servers  (Akamai CDN) from our data center at that moment.

rcs-rds-4

So basically, we had to pay some extra peering traffic that moved from IPv4 Akamai CDN to IPv6 peerings.

With a broadband internet market share of almost 45%, RCS & RDS put Romania first place on IPv6 adoption rate top world wide, as shown in this chart from  http://www.vyncke.org/ipv6status/ (based on Google’s IPv6 measurements):

rcs-rds-5

After June 6th, 2012, we moved on to offering IPv6 to business to business customers. After analysing security implications of all kind of sceneries that matched our network topology, we decided to have the same IPv6 link local (fe80::1) on every interface that represents customer’s default gateway and gave them a ::/48 routed via their IPv6 link local. We also have enabled IPv6 for MPLS customers, our streaming servers and some equipment’s management interface.

Nowadays our IPv6 traffic goes to 30-35G in peak time, mainly because there’s more IPv6 content on the Internet. Our measurements show that 25% of a dual stack residential customer traffic is IPv6 traffic.

rcs-rds-6

Unfortunately, the IPv6 adoption rate in our network has not increased much over time mainly because the lack of IPv6 support on CPEs and the high percentage of Windows XP users whose PPPoE native client doesn’t support IPv6.

For more detailed information regarding IPv6 adoption rate in RCS & RDS residential network we’ve created a webpage with live statistics: http://labs.rcs-rds.ro/?action=ipv6-adoption

About the author: Liviu Pislaru is Chief Architect for IPv6 at RCS&RDS in Romania.

Please visit our IPv6 Case Studies page for more examples of IPv6 deployment. If you would like to get started with IPv6, please visit our IPv6 resources or begin with our “Start Here” page to help find resources most appropriate for your type of organization.  If you have an IPv6 case study you think we should consider for inclusion on our site, please contact us – we are always looking for more!

Editor’s Note: We have added the image below to show the latest IPv6 statistics at the time of publication (June 2, 2014) of this case study. The bottom of the image shows Liviu’s point that IPv6 adoption has been flat over time.  The latest statistics can be found at http://labs.rcs-rds.ro/?action=ipv6-adoption

rcs-rds-7

Jun 18

Google Fiber Shows 77.55% IPv6 Deployment In Latest World IPv6 Launch Statistics

Over on the World IPv6 Launch blog, Mat Ford just announced the most recent set of IPv6 measurements from the 114 network operators participating in the measurements program (and any network operator can join).  Mat notes the great news that an ISP in Singapore, Starhub, moved from 0.1% to over 8% deployment in the space of a month. That is outstanding! Congratulations to the crew at Starhub!

What I personally found even more fascinating was that when I went to the World IPv6 Launch measurements page and clicked on the “IPv6 deployment” column header twice to get a list sorted by the highest percentage…

Google Fiber came out as #1 with a staggering 77.55% of all observed traffic being over IPv6:

World IPv6 Launch statistics for June 18

 

To be clear, let us remember how these statistics are collected.

Google, Facebook and Yahoo all measure the amount of IPv6 traffic they are seeing coming in to their respective sites and services from all the participating networks. (You can read more about their specific techniques at the bottom of the Measurements page.) That information is then averaged and presented on the Measurements page for each ISP.

In this case 77.55% of the traffic received across those three measurement providers from the Google Fiber network was all over IPv6.  Amazing!  Congratulations to the Google Fiber team!

P.S. It’s also interesting to note the growth of many networks versus where they were when we last wrote about the statistics in April. For instance, the top 10 networks sorted on observed percentage of IPv6 are now all over 30%.