I’m a homelabber but know next to nothing about IPv6. What I do know, however, is that my ISP, Bell Canada, doesn’t support it. If Bell were to work toward IPv6 support what actually needs to be done?

I imagine all their networking gear would need IPv6 IPs and IPv6-specific routing tables in addition to the IPv4 routing tables (which might need loads of RAM?), customer equipment would need to be updated or replaced and any services that Bell provides would also need to be available via IPv6. What other not obvious changes would need to be made?

  • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    3 months ago

    For bell? A committee to discuss the feasibility of enabling IPv6. Along with an 18 month working group to make sure it doesn’t mess with production or legacy systems, regional prefix delegation planning. Then a 2 year pilot program.

    For the ISP I ran for a decade. Call my upstream ISP and asked for IPv6 to be enable on our transit links.

    IPv6 has been supported on carrier gear since the late 1990s but hasn’t been enabled because it wasn’t needed.

  • jatone@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    Very little tbh. Almost all networking hardware has supported ipv6 for over a decade now. Its mostly just their operations teams properly configuring them…

    Which usually works out of the box and you have to do work to disable it. Doubt they’d need to do much more than input their ipv6 ranges into the system.

    Routing tables are tiny in practice, most of the hardware requirements come from having to have concurrent connections shovelling packets around.