IPV6 : A SERVICE PROVIDER PERSPECTIVE 19 th May, 2015

Agenda  Introduction to Xplornet  The need for IPv6  Our Options  Level of Difficulty  Impact  Traffic Trends  The Future  Some Resources

Who is Xplornet?  Canada’s Largest Rural Broadband provider  Hybrid network: 4G Satellites and Fixed Wireless  Focused on Residential Broadband

Author’s and Presenters Introduction  Ron Arsenault:  IP Designer and Resident IPv6 Guru   Mohsin Sohail:  Principal Planner 

The Need for IPv6  Next Generation Satellite Platform  Satellite Modems supported dual stack for the Data plane  Control/Mgmt plane was IPv6  IP Exhaustion  Mgmt /Control Plane Yes – running out of RFC1918  Don’t have any Network Layer abstraction yet (MPLS)  Data plane – not really as we have IPv4 NAT – however, IPv6 gives a direct shot to the internet!

Options  We went straight to Dual stack!  No Tunneling and no transition strategies  Life was easy for us because this was a greenfield deployment and the Modems supported IPv6  Got ARIN assignment: 2600:E000::/28  Got Transit from our existing providers

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Level Of Difficulty  Access  As mentioned the Modems supported IPv6  Core  Our Core had the latest routers with the latest images which also supported IPv6  Edge  Getting IPv6 transits was a piece of cake ( Our first attempt was with GTT )

Impact  Subscriber Experience:  No problems experienced this was completely transparent to the customers  Win 7, Vista etc all supported dual stack  Operations  A new set of skills was required and this was a challenge  Engineering  IPv6 is now always the first thing ( instead of the last thing )

Design Decisions  IPv4 design should not depend on IPv6 Design and vice versa.  Complete separation between families ( per- address BGP sessions )  Multi-topology ISIS  Stay far away from transition strategies  Host effectively gets a /64

Traffic Trends  Different OS’ and applications will prefer different means of accessing the internet.  Certain Apple Products seem to prefer IPv6 vs IPv4 NAT  NetFlix and Youtube tend to use IPv6 ( happy eyeballs )  If there is a AAAA record – IPv6 appears to be chosen!

Traffic Trends  Traffic Split( new platform only ) – IPv6/IPv4  Real Time Entertainment: 60/40  Social Networking: 70/30  Web Browsing: 40/60

The Future  Our Network Element Traffic Graphs don’t classify traffic by Type ( IPv4 and IPv6 ). We use Netflow ( but then that’s based on a sampling rate )  We have an Analytics platform on the Edge which shows IPv6 stats but would be beneficial to have more granular visibility further in the Core and Access  Expand IPv6 to other brownfield deployments  Press Vendors for Dual stack support

Some Resources  Hurricane Electric’s “IPv6 Certification” program, which I strongly recommend for getting one’s hands dirty   A few Nanog presentations, including but not limited to:  undamentals_N47_Wed.pdf  pv6_61309_N46.pdf   6NET IPv6 deployment guide, old but outrageously comprehensive 