IPv6 Cogent vs Hurricane Electric

Fri Dec 4 02:02:04 UTC 2015

> On Dec 2, 2015, at 8:38 PM, Ryan Rawdon <ryan at u13.net> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Dec 1, 2015, at 1:23 PM, Max Tulyev <maxtul at netassist.ua> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi All,
>> 
>> we got an issue today that announces from Cogent don't reach Hurricane
>> Electric. HE support said that's a feature, not a bug.
>> 
>> So we have splitted Internet again?
>> 
>> I have to change at least one of my uplinks because of it, which one is
>> better to drop, HE or Cogent?
> 
> 
> There is another option, instead of choosing just one - perhaps establish a tunnel to HE from a L3 device that can do the tunneling in hardware?  You can get a HE tunnel for free, and they will speak BGP to you.
> 
> Alternatively, if you are on any IXes where HE is present - they will not only peer with you for v6, but announce a full table if you want it.

Looking at the most recent IPv6 data available at CAIDA you can see the customer cone size:

http://as-rank.caida.org/?data-selected-id=15

Be careful as the tool seems fragile when switching from the 2014-09-01 IPv6 dataset and trying to sort by options, it seems to switch back to IPv4 silently.

Prefixes and/or AS’es in customer cone are likely the best measure, but even there Cogent is 2x HE.net.  The only place where he.net leads is the transit degree with is likely distorted because of what you mention above, full tables, etc.

I find this data interesting and wish there was something more recent than 2014-09-01 to test with.  Perhaps I could do something with all these atlas credits I have.  (or someone could use them for me).

- Jared