Comcast, TWC Plan Major IPv6 Rollouts For 2012, 2013
Comcast and Time Warner Cable expect to upgrade a substantial number of broadband customers from the current IPv4 protocol to the newer IPv6 this year, although neither company is offering many specific details just yet. Those plans put the top two U.S. cable operators at the forefront of announced IPv6 deployments by major U.S. ISPs.
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Comcast will roll out IPv6 in half of its network across the U.S. by June 30, said John Brzozowski, the company’s chief architect for IPv6. Speaking at the first of two recent industry conferences on the subject, he said the company is “happily on our way to nationwide IPv6 deployment” by early to mid-2013. Comcast, the first of the major U.S. cable operators to upgrade its network to IPv6, has introduced the new Internet Protocol addressing protocol in several markets, including Chicago, the San Francisco Bay area, south Florida and southern New Jersey.
Brzozowski claimed Comcast is the first U.S. ISP to support IPv6 in its residential home gateway devices. Speaking at the North American IPv6 Summit in Denver earlier this month, he said Comcast has extended IPv6 to home gateways in two cities, integrating the protocol on six different DOCSIS gateway models so far. Comcast said it’s upgraded two of its major Web portals -- Xfinity (the company’s main Web site for subscribers) and XfinityTV (the company’s TV Everywhere hub) -- and the Comcast customer support forum to the new Internet addressing plan. Comcast said it made the “critical move” in tandem with its content delivery network vendor, Akamai, and is gearing up to add support for native IPv6 for all of its other key websites.
Comcast will unveil an IPv6 home networking solution later this year, probably by summer, Brzozowski said. Such a move will become more meaningful as more content providers shift their Web content to IPv6-equipped websites and more consumers buy newer IPv6-capable consumer electronics devices. Comcast said it had temporarily halted part of its nationwide IPv6 deployment in late March, upon learning that a Netgear retail modem was shipped with an “uncertified version of firmware that exacerbates a critical IPv6-related defect.” Comcast said it expected Netgear to patch the problem soon.
Time Warner Cable is shooting to put at least 100,000 broadband customers on IPv6-capable networks by June 6, the new World IPv6 Launch Day, said Lee Howard, director of network technology. Now conducting small IPv6 field trials in several undisclosed markets, the company plans to start trials in all six of its cable regions this spring, he said. Like Comcast, he said Time Warner Cable also sees 2012 as a big year for IPv6 rollouts, with more deployments planned for 2013.
Cox Communications doesn’t intend to roll out IPv6 to all broadband subscribers nearly as quickly as Comcast or Time Warner Cable. Cox has already started delivering IPv6 to its commercial customers who take optical services, said Jeff Finkelstein, senior director of network architecture. “We are slowly moving toward market trials in a limited number of markets this year -- not as quickly as Comcast and Time Warner, but we are taking a lot of learnings out of their early market launches,” he said. “By the end of the year, we are hoping to be in more than three trial markets.” Similar to Time Warner Cable, Cox is now conducting small field trials in several undisclosed markets.
The three cable operators are deploying IPv6 using the native dual stack method, essentially deploying IPv4 and IPv6 side-by-side throughout their networks. Industry experts generally view native dual stack as the most graceful, effective way to introduce the IPv6 protocol while continuing to support IPv4 for existing subscribers and devices. But native dual stack is usually the most expensive method as well, which has led some carriers to consider such cheaper transition strategies as tunneling and carrier-grade network address translation. Brzozowski, Finkelstein and Howard said their extensive examination of the various IPv6 transition options led them to conclude that native dual-stack makes the most sense. They said all of the other options amount to no more than Band-Aid approaches that postpone addressing the real problem, which is rolling out IPv6 to their entire customer bases. “I can’t say there are not circumstances under which we wouldn’t use a different transition strategy,” Howard said. “But since native IPv6 is our long-term strategy anyway, it makes more sense to do that now.”