* Sprint has been quietly offering IPv6 services for many years
While other top-tier ISPs including Verio, MCI and Global Crossing are announcing early customers of IPv6, the next-generation Internet Protocol, Sprint has been quietly offering the emerging service to government and enterprise customers for many years.
Sprint has supported IPv6 since 1997, when it began working on the 6Bone, an experimental research network for testing IPv6. Today, Sprint says it has 350 customers taking advantage of that free service.
“Initially, it was academia and some hardware vendors,” says Rob Rockell, manager of IP solutions development at Sprint. “We’re seeing growth in the enterprise sector, particularly in the federal government. The [U.S. Department of Defense] represents a large portion of the people.”
Sprint says most of the usage of its IPv6 service is for experimentation. However, Sprint still doesn’t see much commercial demand for IPv6 other than as a check-off box on corporate requests for proposals.
“If you look at the traffic ratios of IPv4 to IPv6, it’s almost entirely IPv4 still,” Rockell says. “We don’t see a lot of prime time IPv6 traffic.”
How and when the ISP industry will migrate to IPv6 is an issue for much debate. IPv6 is an upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol that was developed by the IETF.
IPv6 promises easier administration, tighter security and an enhanced addressing scheme when compared to IPv4, the Internet’s current protocol. IPv6, which uses a 128-bit addressing scheme, supports a virtually limitless number of uniquely identified systems on the ‘Net, while IPv4 supports only a few billion systems because it uses a 32-bit addressing scheme.
Although the IPv6 protocol was finalized a decade ago, the technology is just beginning to attract the attention of enterprise customers in the U.S. The Defense Department is one of the first and largest organizations to commit to IPv6 migration. Other early adopters include Defense contractors and high-tech equipment vendors such as Cray, an MCI customer, and Juniper, a Verio customer.
“If a customer has an interest or requirement, Sprint has a way to meet those needs today,” says Steve Parrott, IP product management for Sprint. “There isn’t a specialized IPv6 product solution. If we see that demand and requirement, we’ll move down that path. Today, it’s just a capability of the network today for those customers that have an interest.”
Sprint’s IPv6 offering is an overlay on its IPv4 network. The IPv6 traffic is tunneled over the IPv4 backbone, rather than being dual stack IPv4/IPv6 or native IPv6. In addition, Sprint has seven routers in the U.S. that are IPv6 only.
“We commonly see requests for proposals that ask what’s Sprint’s IPv6 strategy, but it’s mainly a compliance issue,” Parrott says. “It just hasn’t made the leap from a requirement to usage, even from our government customers. That day will come, and when that day comes we know we’ll be there.”
Parrott says one factor holding up enterprise usage of IPv6 is that the IETF hasn’t finished the standards for multi-homing, a technique that allows users to share network services across multiple ISPs.
