On Sat, 22 Mar 2008, Kevin Day wrote:
On Mar 22, 2008, at 2:44 PM, Joel Snyder wrote:
We would like to get an IPv6 tunnel to begin limited testing of IPv6 for customers. Is there any IPv6-savvy ISP out there who will give/ sell tunnels to other ISPs?
Experimentation with SixXS.NET has proven to be problematic, so I'd rather have a more stable and commercial relationship if possible.
You've got a few options.
First, if you're having a problem with SixXS, make sure you let them know. They're good guys there, and their support tends to be faster than some companies we've bought transit from. :) But, you're right, that isn't a commercial service and is more on the "best effort" side of things, instead of the SLA side. There are other services like SixXS that give out tunnels more-or-less automatically (tunnelbroker.net from Hurricane Electric, is the other big one), but that's also pretty much a best effort service.
FWIW, we handle the tunnelbroker.net tickets sent to ipv6@he.net the same as customer tickets sent to support@he.net or noc@he.net (same ticket system). We also follow up in the forums: http://tunnelbroker.net/forums Since we provide /48s via a button and the ability to set your reverse DNS servers in the tunnelbroker.net interface, those two sources of traditional support tickets are reduced.
If you're wanting more than an auto-created tunnel, because you want to run BGP or have your own space announced, or someone to yell at when it breaks, you'll probably need to find someone who will treat a tunnel like a customer connection.
In our case: phone support and priority for network engineer attention.
Hurricane Electric was offering BGP over tunnels at one point, but I don't know if they still are. Sprint made an announcement years ago that they were offering free tunnels with BGP and treated them more or less like customer ports, but I don't know if that's still happening.
We review BGP tunnel requests manually to ensure that request came from somebody at the actual AS owner. We setup tunnels with BGP using specific routers in various locations, that are separate from the auto-created tunnels. We are gradually adding geographically disperse BGP tunnel servers to provide closer endpoints for users. When possible Hurricane would prefer to give native IPv6 transit at an exchange we have in common rather than giving IPv6 transit via a tunnel. The vast majority of Hurricane's IPv6 peering is via native sessions.
If your use is really small, we've given some free "tunnels as customers" to a few ISPs, but I don't know if the level of support I'm offering is really what you're looking for either.
I don't know that anyone out there right now is doing a "Tunnels for Dollars" kinda situation, because it's so hard to support.
We do. We have customers with paid commercial IPv6 tunnels. Some companies and organizations can't or don't want to use free service. Paying for service gets phone support, help with custom configurations, engineering attention to your specific use, and a sales rep to deploy more service. Of course we provide and recommend native connectivity for transit connections and colo. Mike. +----------------- H U R R I C A N E - E L E C T R I C -----------------+ | Mike Leber Wholesale IPv4 and IPv6 Transit 510 580 4100 | | Hurricane Electric Web Hosting Colocation AS6939 | | mleber@he.net http://he.net | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+