Greenfield IPv4 + IPv6 broadband deployment

[Frank Bulk]

I'm just not aware of an ISP that requires a customer to provide their
router -- if a service provider uses a modem or ONT, the customer is free to
plug in a router or their PC directly.  At least that's the way it is in
North America.

That said, I would say that definitely than 10% and probably less than 5% of
our customers don't use a router.  I'm not worried about a customer having
50 devices -- they would likely have a router in that case.  Most of our
configs hand out only one IPv4 address, so they're already "programmed" to
know that if they want multiple devices online the home that they need to
use a router, and 99.9%, it's a wireless router.

So I'm aware of the ND concerns, but with our small operations (<8,500
broadband users across 4 different access platforms), the ND concerns are
minimal.

Frank

-----Original Message-----
From: Mikael Abrahamsson [mailto:swmike at swm.pp.se] 
Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2011 8:58 PM
To: Frank Bulk
Cc: Adam Armstrong; Dan White; IPv6 operators forum
Subject: RE: Greenfield IPv4 + IPv6 broadband deployment

On Sat, 26 Feb 2011, Frank Bulk wrote:

> It's a bit much, in our customer base, to require a router.

Could you please elaborate on that?

It's my world view that a majority of people already have a NAT gateway 
(because they want wifi etc), and the people who don't, do they really 
need IPv6 connectivity right away? When they want it, they can purchase a 
router and then have it.

I just see so many downsides with supporting a vendor routed /64 that I 
don't see that I can recommend it. Of course, large deployment hasn't 
happened yet so operationally we don't know what's going to happen.

If you're going to be the default gw of the /64, I think it's a good idea 
to enforce what number of IPv6 addresses and mac addresses you support in 
the service. Handling lots of ND is not going to scale, you really don't 
want to be part of the home network if you can avoid it. Think 50 devices 
which might have multiple IPv6 addresses each. That's a lot of ND and TCAM 
usage.

I'm sure you can get away with it initially, but isn't it better to do it 
right from the start than to have to stop doing it and converting the 
users later?

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se