Dennis Burgess Says IPv6 Will Give WISPs a Competitive Advantage

“We’ve been IPv6-enabled for six to eight months,” says Dennis Burgess of WISPA vendor member Link Technologies. Burgess believes that as the large monopolies hesitate to deploy IPv6 routing, smaller, more agile WISPs can benefit by leaping ahead.

For Link Technologies, IPv6 adoption was eased by the fact that it is supported on all Mikrotik routers. “We just flipped a software switch and rebooted our routers in the middle of the night, say at 2 AM, so that our customers would not be affected.”

Most WISP networks will have a backup router on the main line of the network, but might not have a backup router on the branches of their network, so some but not all customers might lose internet for less than one minute. WISPs generally warn customers in advance of “routine software maintenance” so that nobody is surprised if they lose a connection for a brief time.

Beating the competition

Burgess says that IPv4 addresses are running out. He notes that Microsoft just purchased 666,624 IPv4 addresses from Nortel for $7.5 million, which is almost exactly $11.25 per address. Burgess therefore expects upstream providers to begin charging for IPv4 address.

He also notes that the NICs have said that they will start cracking down on those who have addresses that they’re not using, but that the NICs have not yet done so.

Burgess recently attended NANOG52 in Denver, where the issue of scarce IPv4 addresses was discussed. He says that a representative from APNIC said that the NIC for the Asia-Pacific region has run out of IPv4 addresses.

WISPs can get ahead of the game by deploying a dual stack on their network in order to support both IPv4 and IPv6. Burgess says that large ISPs, such as AT&T and Comcast, seem hesitant to deploy a dual stack.

The immediate advantage of being a dual stack network, Burgess says, is that government (federal, state, and local) has to be IPv6, so that when contracts from the federal government as well as city hall and police departments come up for renewal, those WISPs that have deployed a dual stack network will have a critical advantage in bidding for those contracts.

In the longer term future, Burgess says that webhosts will run out of IPv4 addresses and that when they do, some websites will be IPv6-only. At that point, he says, content will drive demand for IPv6 services, and those WISPs that already offer IPv6 will have a significant advantage. WISPs that have the bandwidth — those with access to fiber delivering 100 Mbps or more symmetric, but not those whose networks are fed by T-1 lines, DSL, or cable — may be offering webhosting themselves and may wish to offer IPv6 to their webhosting customers.

Troubleshooting

If necessary, WISPs can tunnel IPv6 to a specific customer using 6to4, but Burgess warns that there are potential performance issues with such tunneling. Also, a bridged network will pass IPv6 packets, but bridges are a less rigorous design choice than routers.

Burgess notes that some old equipment may lack the power (or features) to handle IPv6. Ubiquiti users have been requesting IPv6 since at least 2009. But for the most part, Burgess says, WISPs should be able to deploy a dual stack network with no more than a software upgrade to the necessary equipment.

On World IPv6 day, many companies had staffed call centers, anticipating a large volume of calls from users eager to learn about IPv6. Burgess says that at NANOG52, those companies (Yahoo, Akamai, Comcast, etc.) reported that there were almost no calls. Although IPv6 traffic did spike on World IPv6 Day, it was no more than six percent to twelve percent of the total volume of internet traffic reported by the companies.