Estonian IPv6 deployment report

[Tarko Tikan]

hey,

Some time ago, many people noticed rapid IPv6 deployment growth in 
Estonia (from 0% to 5% in 4 weeks). We at 3249/Elion/Estonian Telecom 
were behind this, other operators don't have any serious IPv6 
deployments at the moment. We rolled out v6 to everyone (both business 
and residential customers) with last-gen CPE, there was no hop-in our 
hop-out program - aim was to do it perfectly and without customers even 
noticing. I'm happy to say that we achieved this goal :)

To satisfy general interest, I promised small (somehow it turned out 
longer than I expected) technical writeup how we enabled v6 for our 
subscribers. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask and I do 
my best to answer them. You can also skip the technical content and 
there are some statistics below.


Our access network is mix of DSL/GPON/wimax/p2p-ETH and broadband 
service is deployed in shared service vlans. IPv6 traffic shares vlan 
with IPv4.

Service vlans are transported over MPLS metro network using pseudowires 
and terminated in geo-clustered Alcatel 7750 BNG routers.

Each subscriber is allocated up to 4 mixed v4 and v6 IP hosts. For v4 we 
are using the usual DHCP, for IPv6 we are using DHCPv6 with IA_PD only, 
no IA_NA is provided. Unfortunately DHCPv6 provides no way to signal 
IPv6 default-route thus we have to fall back to RA for default-route. RA 
does not include any on-link prefixes or DNS information. RAs are L2 
unicasted to CPE MAC so no other CPE in service vlan picks up those RAs. 
To ensure rapid switchover between BNG routers, we are signalling 
virtual link-local address as default-route.

We are using ALU internal DHCP/DHCPv6 servers to allocate leases but we 
also signal IP information from radius (in such case BNG "fakes" DHCP 
server) for static IP customers. Provided IPv6 prefix is always /56 and 
we keep the old lease for 24h even if the CPE is turned off (actual 
lease time is 30min).

Unfortunately, IPv6 LDRA is not available on most of our access 
platforms so we have to rely on IPv4 session information for 
authentication. This linking is done in the radius server during 
subscriber authentication (excellent radiator + quite awful SQL queries 
:) - if subscriber has IPv4 session (that has been authenticated using 
DHCP opt82), same MAC address is allowed to have IPv6 session on exactly 
the same virtual BNG port. IPv4 and v6 session are both tied to same 
subscriber and share shapers, QOS etc.

We were able to enable IPv6 only on our last-gen Inteno CPEs. They run 
modified OpenWrt and because it's linux - everything is possible :)

In CPE, /56 is divided up to /64s, first one is currently reserved but 
we will configure it on loopback interface and use it for CPE 
management. Second /64 is configured on LAN and third is configured on 
public wifi SSID (if you choose to enable this option).

In the LAN, IPv6 config is provided by RAs, we also support RDNSS and 
stateless DHCPv6 for DNS. There is also ingress IPv6 firewall in the CPE 
and configuration is modifiable by user.

To make deployment as smooth as possible, we rolled out IPv6 capable CPE 
software first. Then, during the BNG platform refresh, we deployed L2 
ACLs that dropped all IPv6 traffic based on 0x86dd ethertype. We then 
deployed IPv6 config to all BNGs and could verify everything before 
single v6 lease was handed out to the subscribers.

Then, interface by interface, we replaced L2 ACL with one that only 
allowed 0x86dd for certain, supported, OUIs. This is the current 
situation and we are investigating ways to support 3rd party CPEs - main 
problem is unreliable IPv6 config in CPEs. Many don't enable DHCPv6 (or 
enable NA but no PD) but still pick up default-route from RA and happily 
signal it to LAN. Some others hammer our BNGs with NA request every 0.1 
seconds etc.


As statistics go, there are 30000+ active IPv6 subscribers (almost 15% 
of our customer base, based on our public numbers), 81% of them have 
have at least one IPv6 enabled device in the LAN, 70% have more than 
one. Most IPv6 traffic is generated by Google+Youtube, Facebook and 
Akamai. Not bad for a country with 1.3M people.

Next up: mobile network :)

-- 
tarko