IPv6 needs optimization for service parity

Jessica Scarpati
11 Apr 2011
00:00
 
Comcast Corp, which began testing IPv6 on its live network in January 2010, has made IPv6 performance and service parity "a guiding light throughout the duration of the program so far," said John Jason Brzozowski, chief IPv6 architect and distinguished engineer at Comcast.
 
Engineers in Comcast Innovation Labs have worked with the protocol for years. The service provider recently launched a trial in Littleton, Colo., testing IPv6 in a native dual-stack configuration over DOCSIS 3.0, and it has also begun evaluating IPv6 support for set-top boxes, Brzozowski said. Comcast publicly announced last month that it would abandon its trials with a tunneling technology known as "IPv6 rapid deployment," or 6rd. The decision was made in favor of pursuing native IPv6 support network-wide, which yields a "more advanced and highly-capable" level of service, Brzozowski said.
 
"The technology trials ... play a very big role in our ability to learn how to make the introduction of v6 seamless to our subscribers," he said. "[IPv6 performance] has always been a very high priority for us to make sure that we maintain parity as best we can."
 
Service providers must consider optimizing IPv6 performance as part of the foundation to their telecom IPv6 migration strategies -- not as an afterthought once mere transport is enabled -- according to Ivan Pepelnjak, chief technology advisor at NIL Data Communications, a technology consulting firm based in Slovenia. 
 
"It must be built into the early phases or you'll start losing your customers," he said. "The moment you enable IPv6 in your network, your customers will use IPv6 preferentially to connect to servers with IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. If IPv6 doesn't work as well as IPv4, you'll directly hurt customers."
 
Realistically, however, most service providers have only begun to pilot IPv6 on their networks to get operational experience with it, Pepelnjak said.
 
"We haven't even discovered all the broken things yet," Pepelnjak said.
 

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