Belgian cable operator VOO looked at the future of the Internet several years ago and recognized that they needed a plan to move to IPv6 if they were to continue to efficiently grow their business. As the leading provider of broadband cable services in the southern part of Belgium they provide video, high speed Internet at speeds of up to 100Mbps, and digital telephony services, primarily to residential customers in Wallonia and Brussels. The company has been one of the fastest growing service providers in Europe; since VOO launched its triple play services at end of 2009, they’ve acquired more than 1 million subscribers. VOO also recently acquired a 3G mobile license to expand their service capabilities.
For network operators such as VOO, business and service is continuity critical. They cannot afford to have services affected while they migrate to new technology. VOO ultimately selected Cisco’s Carrier Grade IPv6 solution since we gave them a clear migration path to IPv6 and they sought a trusted partner who could offer a future flexible solution. Using our dual-stack technology with the Cisco CRS-3 and CMTS they can run IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously in order to maintain a high-quality customer experience during the transition.
Nico Weymaere, VOO’s Chief Technology Officer shares his view on the positive impact of IPv6 for both his company and the Internet:
The IPv6 capabilities of the VOO network will provide them a foundation to easily support new services. As we’ve noted previously with our Visual Networking Index, by 2016, there will be nearly 19 billion global network connections (fixed and mobile); the equivalent of two and a half connections for every person on earth. We can’t get there with the limited address space provided by IPv4.
On behalf of Cisco, let me thank the entire VOO team for putting your trust in us.
Today marks a huge milestone in the networking industry – the official launch by the Internet Society (ISOC) of the new IPv6-based Internet helps ensure its continued growth and impact on the world economy. This new Internet has been in the works for over two decades, including the publication of the first IPv6 standard (RFC2460) by Steven Deering of Cisco and Robert Hinden of Nokia. Since then the industry has made incredible investments in technology to reach this successful achievement including today’s official participation of over 2000 websites and 50+ network operators. According to some of our own calculations we’re estimating that 30% of the world’s web pages are now directly reachable by IPv6.
For us at Cisco on our Service Provider Marketing team, it’s been an exciting journey. We first sought to make the industry challenge imposed by the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses more widely understood by a non-technical audience. Hence our effort at some humor with Read More »
Everyone is talking about the transition to IPv6 in the run up to the June 6th launch of the IPv6 Internet. Most of the discussion has focused on the technical details of various approaches – 6rd vs. DS-Lite vs. CGNAT for example. However, what we haven’t seen is an effort made to look at the economic impact of the choice between IPv4 extension vs. IPv6 transition and back it up with some real world data. A few months back we asked telecommunications analyst Nav Chander of IDC (pictured right) to evaluate and publish the results of an economic analysis of the IPv6 options. This is a crucial and timely topic because operators are faced with important decisions about which transition technologies to use, when to implement them, and where in the network.
We’re pleased to report that Nav is finished and is ready to reveal the results of his findings. To keep the scope of his analysis within a reasonable boundary, he initially focused on just one scenario: that of a wireline carrier considering the deployment of a Carrier Grade NAT-only implementation (which basically just extends the life of IPv4 with no IPv6), or migrating to IPv6 with a combination of CGNAT (for short term IPv4 extension) and while new customers were deployed with 6rd.
The results of this study are detailed in a new Read More »
For many students, this time of the year marks “Spring Break”. (Ah, just the thought of this brings back fun memories…) However, once you get past the stereotypical party imagery, it really is a time of assessment. Mid-term exams complete and we ask ourselves what we need to do to achieve that final grade. Service providers find themselves in similar circumstance with the IPv6 subject as World IPv6 “graduation” day quickly approaches in June.
At the March 20th Light Reading Cable event in Denver, two pioneers in the IPv6 field – our own Fred Baker, a Cisco Fellow and IETF Chair, and John Brzozowski, Chief IPv6 Architect at Comcast — talk candidly about the benefits of IPv6, beyond address widening; how operators are doing, in terms of the upcoming launch; and what happens post-transition. Fred also handles one he hears a lot “When is IPv6 going to be done? Because I’ll deploy it then…”
Cisco has taken a leadership role in driving the industry on the creation of standards associated with IPv6. At recent count we had over 458 RFCs related to IPv6 – over a third of the total!
One example of this is how our technical leaders have taken on the challenge in dual stack (IPv4 and IPv6) networks to reduce user-noticeable delays in when the IPv6 path is broken or slow. We’ve documented a method called “Happy Eyeballs” as described in Internet-Draft “Happy Eyeballs: Trending Towards Success (IPv6 and SCTP”).
