[AusNOG] IPv6 Article on CNN

[John Edwards]

On 31/05/2010, at 10:09 PM, Mark Newton wrote:

>> 
>> For what it's worth, the retail side of the never-realised OPEL network was designed for IPv6 broadband access on the DSL service.
> 
> With all due respect, John, the retail side of the actually-realized 
> Telstra DSL network (the one that reaches most homes in Australia, and
> which just about every ISP uses) is also designed for IPv6 broadband
> access on the DSL service.  

Disagreeing with the OPEL project is dangerously close to agreeing with Conroy ;)

> 
> It's PPP-over-L2TP.  You can run any layer-3 protocol you want, including
> IPv6.

OPEL wholesale got all the press - Elders Communications was charged with ensuring that the wholesale network would actually connect people in all of the areas promised. There were TV advertising campaigns, MP's championing the project and full-time area reps on the road gathering interest - all in regional areas, which somehow eluded Australia's metro-centric tech media who were more interested in the wholesale/funded side of the project.

The Juniper Network (which mostly never made it out of the wooden crates it is still in today) was IPv6 to the BRAS, and although it wasn't as elegant as the prefix delegation solution Internode has come up with it did provide native IPv6. The OSS was being built to handle IPv6 as was the accounting. The Adelaide office was already running on 2402:5000::/32, now reclaimed by APNIC. 


> 
> The issue isn't whether the wholesale platform supports it, it's whether
> the ISP supports it.
> 
>> At the time, no WiMAX vendor supported IPv6
> 
> ... which is irrelevent.  We have WiMAX-connected customers on a pre-OPEL
> network using IPv6 right now.


I'm referring to standards based WIMAX, not "I can't believe its not WIMAX" pre-standard solutions. When you want to run a wholesale subscriber-oriented network with features like Mobility - there aren't any mac addresses to just run whatever protocol you like on. The protocol is defined when you setup a service flow, and isn't carried with every frame like it is with most media types used by ISP's. This means that the vendor needs to know how to explicitly handle the packet/protocol. Most vendors supported CS-specification 1 (IPv4) and maybe 3 (802.3 Ethernet). IPv6 is value 2. 

You can't just partition off wholesale customers like with DSL or even ethernet because there isn't a physical port to constrain them to - everyone comes in on a shared medium direct from their own CPE. WIMAX uses a Customer Service Node (CSN) for wholesale partitioning, which relies on the IPv4 address of the customer to determine their ISP after login.

Sure you can configure a point-to-point ethernet connection, but then you have high-touch setups with every customer, no tower redundancy and some kind of meshed VLAN nightmare. Not very scalable. Maybe you could deploy a managed CPE instead and hope no-one figures out how it works (I wonder if the NBN will legally prohibit taking your ONT to your neighbour's house!).

IPv6 stateless auto-configuration also relies heavily on multicast, something that also didn't feature in WIMAX products at the time.

John Edwards



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