IPv6 needs optimization for service parity

 

 

Service providers and IPv6 experts have repeatedly acknowledged in interviews with SearchTelecom.com over the past year that vendor support for IPv6 is improving, but it remains inconsistent at best.

 

"Vendors [haven't come] to the marketplace very aggressively to offer anything in the v6 space. In fact, very far from it -- it was like pulling teeth to get vendors to deliver anything in terms of v6 capability," Levy said. "We have been pushing for the last umpteen years [for them] to build solutions that are on-par, meaning anything I can do with IPv4, I should be able to do with IPv6."

 

Those shortcomings over the years have ranged from the trivial to the complex. Vendors have been slow to meet simple demands such as having packets move at the same speeds for both protocols. They also struggle to support more nuanced areas of back-end infrastructure, such as having network monitoring flow capabilities be available in IPv6, Levy said.

 

Comcast was more forgiving of its vendors but acknowledged that limitations for IPv6 feature parity remained a challenge.

 

"That's not something I can elaborate deeply on, but I can tell you there's a lot of progress and great work people are doing in the v6 space," Brzozowski said. "But there's still work to be done."

 

At least with what is IPv6-capable, service providers are likely to find that homegrown back-end systems will require the most attention and "some hardware-based platforms have very low default limits for IPv6 routing tables," according to Pepelnjak.

 

Service providers will also have to rewrite packet filters to use IPv6 addresses and modify them slightly to support Internet Control Message Protocol version 6 (ICMPv6), the ICMP standard for use with IPv6, he said.

 

Many telecom network equipment vendors "still lack feature parity" between IPv6 and IPv4 products, Pepelnjak said. Shortcomings include missing security features and the ability to support small customer multi-homing.

 

"[Carriers] should vote with their wallet, make IPv6 a mandatory purchasing requirement ... and drop vendors that lack IPv6 support," he said.

 

John Curran, president and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), said the onus for IPv6 performance isn't entirely on telecom network equipment vendors and service providers. Content providers that fail to enable IPv6 support on their Web servers and force visitors to take a performance hit passing through gateways risk revenue losses, he said.

 

"I expect the service providers will be very clear in telling [subscribers when] the website they're going to is only on IPv4 and the consequence of it," Curran said.