Canadian ISPs’ slow deployment of IPv6 due to lack of demand, expert says

Canadian Internet service providers’ (ISPs) slow deployment of the new IPv6 Internet protocol is largely the result of a lack of demand from business and government, Yves Poppe, director of business development IP strategy at Tata Communications Ltd., said. “They’ve been waiting for the enterprise sector to move and the enterprise sector has of course been slow to move and say, ‘We need IPv6,’” Poppe said in a phone interview Wednesday. Canadian webmasters and ISPs took a small step forward with a 500 per cent increase in IPv6 reachable addresses on the protocol's launch day June 6, but the country as a whole has a long way to go, a panel of national and international experts said at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Communications in Ottawa last week. Ipv6 is the latest version of the Internet protocol (IP) that delivers online data to and from end devices. It is superior to IPv4, its predecessor, because it offers a larger address space and provides increased flexibility in allocating addresses and routing traffic. IPv6 is important at a “relatively urgent” pace as registries around the world run out of available IPv4 addresses, Poppe said. He said the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which oversees global IP address allocation, and the Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APINIC), which registers addresses in the Asia Pacific region, ran out of IPv4 addresses in 2011, and that others will follow. “APINIC was the first one to run out, and the next one will be RIPE ,” Poppe said. “The Europeans, they think they’ll run out of IPv4 addresses by September of this year. It’s not that far away.” He added that the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)—which registers IP addresses to Canada, the U.S., and 26 Caribbean markets—is expected to run out of IPv4 addresses in the spring of next year. Poppe said Canadian ISPs are not ignorant of the need to switch to Ipv6 even if they have been “relatively slow” to deploy it so far. He said large ISPs such as BCE Inc., Telus Corp., Shaw Communications Inc., and Quebecor Media Inc. subsidiary Videotron Ltd. have experimented with the new protocol “for quite a while.” Bell and Telus deployed limited “dual stack” IP services during an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting in Quebec City last year, he said, allowing about 2,000 attendants to use IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously. Poppe said increased demand from large clients, such as corporations or government departments, would help spur IPv6 adoption in Canada. Canada’s IPv6 deployment has also been marked by a lack of participation from the government, which did not make an early decision to mandate the new protocol across equipment suppliers, networks, and software applications, he said. By way of comparison, he said, the U.S. developed plans in 2003 to deploy IPv6 within five years. Bill Sandiford, president of the Canadian Network Operators Consortium (CNOC), a coalition of small ISPs, said in a phone interview that several of his organization’s member ISPs have rolled out IPv6 over DSL but that they cannot do so over cable in most parts of the country. He said small ISPs that want to use the IPv6 protocol over cable cannot make the switch because they await the underlying wholesale components that they purchase from cablecos to become IPv6-compatible. “TechSavvy would like to do IPv6 over cable but Rogers and some of the others aren’t able to do it on their networks yet,” Sandiford said. Sandiford said large service providers, whose stock values are driven by quarter-over-quarter results, may find it “very hard” to justify the cost of rolling out IPv6 services. “By deploying IPv6, you don’t make more money,” Sandiford said. “There’s no additional revenue. You don’t get any of these things. It’s simply if you want your network to be able to run in the future, in two to three years from now, you need it.” Sandiford said it’s difficult for larger ISPs to make a “business case” for IPv6 now that the service will be needed as IPv4 addresses run out. “My knowledge is that IPv6 rollouts are occurring and sure, we’d like to see them go faster, but I don’t think that we’re behind in Canada,” Sandiford said. Rogers spokeswoman Leigh-Ann Popek told The Wire Report that the company’s network is “IPv6 ready.” “Our engineers have been working since 2006 to modernize our network and adopt industry best-practices so that our customers seamlessly continue to have world-leading Internet experiences,” Popek said in an emailed statement Tuesday. “Over time, we’ll move customers to IPv6 in a controlled manner as equipment such as routers, gateways, and modems become upgraded. We (along with operating system and equipment vendors) have worked hard over the past few years to upgrade our network to efficiently manage IPv6 traffic and to ensure a smooth transition for consumers. We’re an IPv6 leader in North America,” she said. Bell spokeswoman Jacqueline Michelis said in an emailed statement Tuesday that Bell has “made significant investments to upgrade our network infrastructure and we are getting ready for IPv6 as well as preparing to support our customers in the various phases of migration from IPv4 to Ipv6.” Philippe Wauthy, product manager at Videotron, said in a phone interview that the company has been using IPv6 for its residential customers through a Videotron and D-Link router since January of last year. “We’ve been working on IPv6 for several years,” Wauthy said. “We had a program to roll this out and we’re beginning to see some traction in the market for this. So it’s starting slowly, but I would say surely.” Kevin Blumberg, co-owner and chief technology officer at Toronto-based small ISP The Wire Inc., said in a phone interview that his company offers IPv6 services on a trial basis. He said North American ISPs are being pushed towards the adoption of the new protocol because Asia and Europe are rapidly moving towards IPv6. “If our customers want to be able to talk to those customers, we have to have IPv6,” he said. John Curran, president and CEO of ARIN, said in a phone interview that the deployment of IPv6 has been slow “because you’re talking about a problem that hasn’t occurred yet.” Curran said the move to IPv6 is “a case of exceptional preparation by the Internet community” to deal with the coming end of available IPv4 addresses. He said some ISPs have been “more aggressive” than others. “But the Internet now is decentralized and each service provider makes their own decision as to when they want to offer that service,” he said. dgrenier@thewirereport.ca

Canadian ISPs’ slow deployment of IPv6 due to lack of demand, expert says

News | 06/21/2012 9:36 pm EDT

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