The good news in the IPv6 world continues with Sky Broadband announcing that over 90% of its customers are now IPv6 enabled. Sky Broadband is the second-largest UK Internet Service Provider with an estimated 6 million residential subscribers, and once its rollout on home CPEs (Consumer Premises Equipment) is completed at the end of 2016, IPv6 will be available to all customers with the exception of those using older non-compliant equipment.
IPv6 connectivity is being provided as dual stack alongside existing IPv4 connectivity, with link-local WAN addressing and each subscriber being provided with a /56 address prefix. The Sky software also supports a stateful IPv6 firewall.
In a related presentation at NLNOG last week, Richard Patterson of Sky Broadband discussed the lessons learned from rolling out IPv6.
The deployment started at the end of July 2015 and was gradually ramped up until September that year, when there was a pause for six months to ensure their RADIUS authentication and recursive DNS systems were scalable, and to evaluate unexpected behaviour encountered from some end client operating systems. The deployments resumed earlier this year once the issues had been ironed out, although these issues were more due to the loads on supporting systems rather than connectivity failures.
Another positive to be drawn is that when Sky Broadband experienced a widespread network outage last month, this affected IPv4 but not IPv6 connectivity, demonstrating how dual stack networking is able to function seamlessly.
At Deploy360 we’d like to help you take advantage of IPv6, so please take a look at our Start Here page to understand how you can get started.