Donald Stahl writes:
I guess we have different definitions for "most significant backbones". Unless you mean they have a dual-stack router running _somewhere_, say, for instance, at a single IX or a lab LAN or something. Which is not particularly useful if we are talking about a "significant backbone". Rather than go back and forth- can we get some real data?
Yes please, I like data!
Can anyone comment on the backbone IPv6 status of the major carriers?
Our three Tier-1(?) upstreams AS1299, AS3356, and AS3549 all provide IPv6. Only one of them has dual-stack on our access link, for the other two we have to tunnel into their IPv6 "backbone" through their IPv4 backbone. I don't know exactly how their internal IPv6 networks are built, although with one of them I'm sure they use/used "6PE", i.e. IPv6 "tunneled" over an IPv6-agnostic MPLS core (learned this from trouble tickets, sigh). But all three offer decent IPv6 connectivity - e.g. we rarely observe gratuitous routing over an ocean and back, or order-of-magnitude RTT or loss-rate differences between IPv4 and IPv6. Our own backbone has been dual-stack for a couple years now, but I guess this just shows that we can't be a "major carrier" - same for many other national "academic" backbones as well as GEANT, the backbone that interconnects those. Same in the US with Internet2 and the regional research/education networks. -- Simon. (AS559)