North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: IPv6 tunnel for ISP sought

  • From: Mike Leber
  • Date: Sat Mar 22 17:34:06 2008

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 [email protected] the same
as customer tickets sent to [email protected] or [email protected] (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 |
| [email protected]                                           http://he.net |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+