My upstream ISP does not support IPv6

Fri Feb 4 03:23:08 UTC 2011

On Fri, 4 Feb 2011, Franck Martin wrote:

> The biggest complaint that I hear from ISPs, is that their upstream ISP does not support IPv6 or will not provide them with a native IPv6 circuit.
>
> Is that bull?
>
> I thought the whole backbone is IPv6 now, and it is only the residential ISPs that are still figuring it out because CPE are still not there yet.
>
> Where can I get more information? Any list of peering ISPs that have IPv6 as part of their products?
>
> It seems to me the typical answer sales people say when asked about IPv6: "Gosh, this is the first time I'm asked this one".
>

I can provide anecdotal feedback on this.  When we did v6 on our network - 
we did it to full v4 parity.  I.e. if we offer v4 / HSRP redundancy / BGP 
full table, etc in a given site, we need to be able to do the same with 
v6.  We acheived that.  At this point I had a decent v6 network, but was 
isolated from the world.  I had to talk to upstreams.

In a nutshell, it was non-trivial.  The upstreams in question will remain 
nameless to protect the guilty, but they are all who some would call 'tier 
1'.  The common themes were:

-	Hmm, don't know our process for that, let me send emails and 
'reach out' and get back to you.

-	We can do it, but we have to home you to a different router.  This 
will be a provisioning exercise and you will get new /30 (/126, etc) and 
new circuit ID.

So it was far from simply adding v6 to our existing circuit(s) and another 
BGP session.  It has taken months.

I couldn't quite wait that long so I did a tunnel w/ BGP to Hurricane and 
got it up in a matter of days.  At that point, at least I could traceroute 
somewhere :)  We are just now finishing up getting native on our transit 
circuits.

--
Brandon Applegate - CCIE 10273
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