1. IPV6 : A SERVICE PROVIDER PERSPECTIVE 19 th May, 2015

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

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

4. Author’s and Presenters Introduction  Ron Arsenault:  IP Designer and Resident IPv6 Guru  Ron.Arsenault@corp.xplornet.com  Mohsin Sohail:  Principal Planner  Mohsin.sohail@corp.xplornet.com

5. 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!

6. 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

7. IPv6 Advertisements

8. 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 )

9. 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 )

10. 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

11. 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!

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

13. 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

14. Some Resources  Hurricane Electric’s “IPv6 Certification” program, which I strongly recommend for getting one’s hands dirty  https://ipv6.he.net/certification/  A few Nanog presentations, including but not limited to:  http://nanog.org/meetings/nanog47/presentations/Wednesday/Hughes_Kosters_f undamentals_N47_Wed.pdf  https://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog46/presentations/Sunday/RAS_Practical_i pv6_61309_N46.pdf  https://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog42/presentations/smith-ipv6.pdf  6NET IPv6 deployment guide, old but outrageously comprehensive  http://www.6diss.org/publications/info/deployment-guide.pdf