- IPv6 news and information

On June 8 the websites listed here will offer their content over IPv6.

The goal of World IPv6 Day is to motivate organizations across the industry – Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies – to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 addresses run out.

The following websites have joined the (growing) list of company’s that will participate in the World IPv6 day:

KTS Australia Pty Ltd

NIC Mexico

Blue Cat Networks

Nolet5

Mozilla

Universidad APEC

Lex Media

Astaro

Hurricane Labs

Today the isoc list has changed so you can see not only websites, but also content networks and other participants. These also now include:

Comcast

Time Warner Cable

Rackspace

Softlayer

[update] The isoc list now reports the ‘other’ participants aswell.

We are excited to announce that Comcast has successfully activated our first group of cable modem customers using IPv6 in a “Native Dual Stack” configuration. These customers can now access content and services natively over both IPv6 and IPv4, since they have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. As a result, they do not need to use any tunneling or translation solutions including Network Address Translation (NAT); they can access IPv6 and IPv4 directly at high-speed, in an unencumbered fashion.

We are also delighted that these are the first Native Dual Stack users activated in a production DOCSIS network in North America! This is a tremendous milestone for Comcast, cable operators, DOCSIS technology, and the Internet community at large. This achievement is a key demonstration and ongoing test of our ability to offer Native Dual Stack Internet services leveraging our production DOCSIS 3.0 network.

On January 11th, 2011, our first 25 IPv6-enabled users came online in the Littleton, Colorado area. Since then, we have expanded the number of users in Colorado and we will soon expand to additional market areas in other parts of the country. Each user has been delegated an IPv6 /64 block as part of the trial which is comprised of approximately 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 (18 quintillion) unique IPv6 addresses, as a first step as we evaluate what will be the optimal IP address allocation size for our customers. Our trial customers are connected using access network devices (cable modem termination systems and cable modems) from Arris and home networking equipment from Apple, both running publicly available software. We will broaden the trial to include other vendors soon.

For more information about the Comcast IPv6 trials, check out the Comcast IPv6 Information Center.

The year 2010 was perhaps the last year we will see without significant progress around IPv6. Here are some of (IMHO) the top 10 IPv6 related stories in 2010. Did I miss any significant story? Please comment.

1. Google turns on IPv6 for Youtube
Google turns on Ipv6 for YouTube at 28 January of 2010. Service providers around the globe are seeing a significant increase in Ipv6 traffic.

Read more…

ARIN announced a few days ago that the upper half of 50/8 now is delegated to Comcast. That is about 8 million addresses and is the largest delegation we have ever seen from a RIR.

It is unclear if this block will be used for customer equipment or just for internal devices. Comcast has previously announced that they are running out of the RFC1918 space and that they are using real IPv4 addresses for internal network devices.

Comcast has announced their plans for IPv6 Trials this year:

2Q2010:

Trial #1 will evaluate tunneling IPv6 over IPv4, using “6RD” technology. 6RD is an open Internet standard developed in the IETF’s Softwires working group. This trial enables us to explore how we may be able to provide production level IPv6 service to customers who have only been issued IPv4 addresses by the ISP network.

Trial #2 will evaluate a native Dual-Stack IPv6 deployment. We will test issuing both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to the customer premise. This trial will attempt to suit a variety of customer premise configurations, and will evolve over time as the customer premise equipment (CPE) support for IPv6 matures. Native, dual-stack is central to our IPv6 strategy and we expect that the native dual-stack solution will be a significant part of the IPv6 transition, enabling IPv6 technology to evolve globally while still being able to provide seamless services to the traditional IPv4 Internet.

3Q2010:

Trial #3 will evaluate tunneling IPv4 over IPv6, using “Dual-Stack Lite” technology (aka DS-Lite). DS-Lite is an open standard defined in the IETF’s Softwires working group. DS-Lite will involve provisioning only an IPv6 address at the customer premise, and creating a IPv4 over IPv6 tunnel between the customer’s home gateway and an Address Family Transition Router (AFTR) in our network. That AFTR enables sharing IPv4 addresses among DS-Lite IPv6 customers. DS-Lite can be seen as the mirror image of 6RD; 6RD enables IPv6 service to IPv4 customers, whereas DS-Lite enables IPv4 service to IPv6 customers. DS-Lite offers the ability to continue an IPv4 service when IPv4 addresses are no longer readily available or are otherwise constrained.

Trial #4 will evaluate how to deploy IPv6 to our Business Class customers, on a native Dual-Stack IPv6 basis.

Its good to see that this big ISP has seen the importance of an IPv6 rollout. Lets  that their trials are successful so we can see Comcast connections with native IPv6 very soon!

You can sign up for the trials right here!