Disruptive Telephony

For those of us wanting to see IPv6 deployed, yesterday brought the great news that Comcast has started rolling out its IPv6 production network to customers.

Now, granted, the initial rollout was to only 100 homes in San Francisco's East Bay. It is also restricted to a single computer directly connected to a Comcast cable modem. This initial rollout did not support home routers which are typically found for WiFi in many/most homes these days.

Still... it's a start!

The experience Comcast gains with this initial rollout will only help them with wider rollouts and the inclusion of home routers.

Kudos to Comcast for this start of their IPv6 rollout... I'm looking forward to hearing of other service providers starting their IPv6 deployments! (Time Warner, I'm talking about you! :-)

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UPDATE: Comcast has now come out with two of their own blog posts on this topic:

• Deployment of IPv6 Begins by Jason Livingood
• Technical Details for Our IPv6 Deployment by John Brzozowski

Notice in particular this great part to the technical piece:

It is also important to note that we are deploying native dual stack, which means a customer gets both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses. That means we are not using tunneling technology or large scale Network Address Translation (NAT). Using a tunnel introduces additional overhead compared to not using one (native IPv6), as your traffic must traverse a relaybefore going to the destination and back. And NAT technologies rely on two layers of NAT, one in your home (in a home gateway device), and one within a the service provider's network that usually shares a single IPv4 address across possibly hundreds of customers or more. Using NAT presents many challenges compared to not using NAT, as your traffic must traverse a NAT device before going to the destination and back. In addition, we believe those two layers of NAT will break a number of applications that are important to our customers.

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Want to see what Voxeo's cool new office space looks like? The 60,000 square feet that also includes "co-working" space for startups?

Kudos to my former colleagues at Voxeo and to CEO Jonathan Taylor in particular for this great video interview on Orlando's Fox 35... check it out:

It's both a very cool space for Voxeons and also a great idea to create a startup incubator right there in the heart of downtown Orlando.

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Would you like to learn about how to deploy IPv6? Would you like to hear from people who are already using IPv6 within their networks? Would you like to learn a bit about DNSSEC and how it can help you secure your online presence?

If so, please join us in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, for our next "Internet ON" (ION) Conference on Monday, November 14, 2011, starting at 12:30pm and sponsored by the Internet Society (my new employer). The sessions on the agenda include:

• New ISOC Initiative – Bridging the Divide Between IETF Standards and Industry-wide Deployment
• Panel Discussion: Challenges and Opportunities in Deploying IPv6, DNSSEC, and Other Key Technologies
• World IPv6 Day Recap (my presentation)
• Ask the Expert: Next Steps to Implementing IPv6
• Closing Remarks and Q&A

We're looking forward to providing a great session for people to ask questions and talk about how to get these technologies actually deployed in networks today.

The ION conference is part of the larger 2011 Canadian ISP Summit that takes place on the following two days and is included as part of the registration for the Canadian ISP Summit.

However, registration for the ION conference is FREE if you just want to attend the half-day session on Monday. You can sign up through the Canadian ISP Summit registration page, where one of the available options is for the ION ONLY registration.

(NOTE: If you do sign up for the free ION Only registration, the lunch and dinner listed on the agenda are not included. Those are part of the full registration.)

If you do want to register for the full Canadian ISP Summit, which has a great agenda of technical and business talks , we have a discount code of "ISOCDC" which can get your $50 off the registration if used by November 11, 2011.

We just had a very successful ION event in Buenos Aires last month and we're looking forward to great conversations and discussions up in Toronto - I hope to see you there!

P.S. A couple of people have already asked me if I'm going to be able to spend more time in Toronto (and meet them). Unfortunately due to family medical issues I'm just in Toronto for Monday and will be flying back Tuesday morning. Normally I would have loved to stay for this full event because some of the other sessions look great - and Toronto is also an outstanding place to visit.

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Last week (Oct 24-27) was the 29th SIPit interoperability test event hosted by ETSI in Monaco. Organizer Robert Sparks has provided his usual outstanding summary of what occurred:

https://www.sipit.net/SIPit29_summary

The key point for me, given my new role, was right up at the top:

44% of the implementations present supported IPv6.

Now, of course ideally we'd like that to be 100%, but hey, it's at least a good start!

There is also some narrative further down the report about "IPv6 Focused Tests" with some interesting info. One interesting note seems to be this:

Most UAs that supported dual-stack had a configuration to tell the application to ignore any returned AAAAs due to issues encountered in deployments where endpoints autoconfigured IPV6 that didn't actually work.

In the web world this has been referred to as the "happy eyeballs" problem where a browser will try a DNS AAAA record to get to a site over IPv6 and then eventually will fail back to trying the A record to go over IPv4. The delay will cause the user to be very UNhappy. There are a couple of ways to address the issue with the usual one being to try both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses simultaneously and then connect over whichever one responds back first. (There is an entire "happy eyeballs" Internet-Draft that goes into this topic for those interested.)

From this simple sentence it would sound to me like the implementations are NOT supporting a "happy eyeballs" approach for SIP but are rather providing an "ignore IPv6" configuration setting. I wasn't there so I don't know... but I would hope that over time all dual-stack SIP implementations would move to supporting this kind of approach (versus disabling IPv6).

It was also good to see that tests occurred in a mixed environment:

We successfully tested calls going though a mix of v4 and v6 hops (accruing Via and Route/Record-Route headers with addresses in both families.

Wearing my security hat I was also pleased to see this:

80% of the endpoints present supported SRTP using sdes

Again, you'd love 100%, but at least this shows the availability of SRTP should companies decide to enable SRTP.

Lots of other great commentary in the SIPit 29 summary around STUN/TURN/ICE and many other issues. Definitely worth a read if you are interested in SIP.

And... if you a creator of SIP-related hardware and software, watch the SIPit website for news of the next SIPit event so that you, too, can join in the testing!

And if you have not heard of SIPit before, here's a video I did back in September 2009 with organizer Robert Sparks:

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