Internode may be alone for some time in IPv6 trial

Large ISPs report no intentions to run IPv6 trials in the short term despite research suggesting IPv4 addresses to run out within three years

IPv6 will take over from the legacy IPv4

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In Europe, few organisations have upgraded to IPv6 according to a survey commissioned by the European Commission.

Of 610 government, educational and other industry organisations surveyed throughout Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia, only 17 per cent had upgraded to IPv6. Broken out separately, ISPs fared poorly, with 92 per cent either not using IPv6 or reporting little IPv6 traffic on their networks.

There's a vicious circle: While IPv4 addresses remain plentiful, end-users see no reason to upgrade

In this light, Internode’s trial is a reconnoitre for the industry and the ISP is a leading IPv6 light in the internet community down under. Aside from helping customers and staff skill up and providing an internal testbed and test-platform for router vendors, it is making the move to help break what it calls the "chicken and egg" problem.

"There's a vicious circle: While IPv4 addresses remain plentiful, end-users see no reason to upgrade," Internode network engineer, Mark Newton, said. "Which means they don't demand IPv6 features from their router vendors or ISPs. Which means IPv6 features and support doesn't make its way into network equipment. Which means the ISPs and end-users don't have the capability to deploy IPv6, which feeds back into the demand side of the cycle."

Newton said the first week of the trial had produced mixed results with take up on par with expectations.

"We've been moderately surprised with how straightforward it has been for customers to make it work, with a few deployment modes we hadn't investigated seeping out of the woodwork— for example, PPPoE passthrough — we didn't test that before the trial started," he said.

The trial has also exposed some router equipment bugs, Newton said, which was one of its specific goals. While he wouldn't expand further on what bugs and with which brands, Newton said the ISP was "working closely" with vendors to resolve them.

"The best thing we've found already, though, is buy-in from ADSL router vendors," he added. "There's an Open-WRT image that owners of various WRT-based routers can run to connect to our trial service relatively painlessly, and we're in discussion with a couple of other brand-name router vendors who are using our service as a test bed."

As a result, Internode says it is quietly confident we'll soon see ADSL equipment on the market which "interoperates painlessly with IPv6 without customers needing to get involved in the technical details".

"That'll be a game changer, removing one of the major barriers to widespread adoption," Newton said.

For more information on IPv6 check out http://www.ipv6.org.au/.

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