[arin-ppml] How hard is it to transition to IPv6?

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joel Jaeggli [mailto:joelja at bogus.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, March 31, 2009 8:24 PM
> To: Ted Mittelstaedt
> Cc: matthew at matthew.at; arin-ppml at arin.net
> Subject: Re: [arin-ppml] How hard is it to transition to IPv6?
> 
> Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> 
> > What the problem is that it's hard to convince someone that 
> the device 
> > they have had for the last 5 years that's still working perfectly, 
> > will not get support from the manufacturer for upgrades.
> 
> Actually it's not, and in most case the adoption will be 
> driven by the same things it was last time. ie more speed  on 
> the wan from your *dsl platform docsis 3.0 or ftth deployment 
> or on the lan side from 802.11n or gigabit ethernet, the 
> trick always is sneak the new software support in with some 
> things the customer really think they want... How many of us 
> are still using the same cpe we were using in the era of 256K 
> dsl service?
> 

Many of our Verizon-layer-2-provisioned DSL customers are because we
buy used Westell modems off the secondary market - often for as
low as $5 a modem - because the competitive reality is that any ISP
selling DSL is mandated to hand out a free CPE to a new customer.
(because the ILEC DSL ISP's are all doing it)

The chipsets that were released during the era of 256kx256k DSL all
supported 7MB down/896K up.  As a matter of fact, the Westell 36R516
is a real riot - because it's got a 10BaseT/half duplex only
ethernet port on it, so even though it's chipset supports 7MB
downstream and will train to that, your never going to get that amount
of data through it's Ethernet port - at least, not to a Windows system.

The issue is one of support - when your
a nationwide ISP your buying support staff off the rack at Costco
and it's more expensive to train them to support a dozen different
CPE's than to just send out a new CPE to exchange for any customer
calling in for support.  When you are a small ISP though, you hire support
people who are more flexible since they are expected to support a
lot of other stuff than just DSL, and supporting a dozen different
CPE models & different firmware revs. comes with the territory.

The unfortunate reality is that there's no "killer app" out there
that requires IPv6, and none of the NEW "all-in-one DSL modem/routers"
supplied by both of the ILECS we provision over support IPv6.  It is
actually going to be easier for us to provision IPv6 over DSL for
customers using antique  bridging-only DSL modems (Westell 36R516,
Westell 2100, etc.) that require the customer to put an
ethernet-to-ethernet router in between the DSL modem and their network,
than for us to provision it over a new, modern DSL modem/address translator,
unless of course, IPv6-compliant firmware is released for the new
device (which is what would be the best solution)

Ted