Chapter 7. Connecting to the IPv6 Internet

“IPv4 works fine, and I have plenty of IPv4 addresses in my IP space for my company, so we don't need to upgrade to IPv6.”

—Anonymous person living in North America

The IPv6 Internet is currently in deployment worldwide. This chapter describes how the IPv6 Internet is built and how to connect to it. After reading this chapter, you will be able to describe the 6bone, its purposes, its architecture, and its addressing. You also will understand how your organization can become a pseudo-TLA on the 6bone, and you will learn the routing policy on the 6bone.

You will also understand policy allocation and how addresses are allocated on the production IPv6 Internet by the regional Internet registries (RIRs) to providers. This chapter discusses the criteria to become an IPv6 Tier-1 provider and the address allocation and reassignment of addresses to customers.

Later, you will learn how Internet service providers (ISPs) can become IPv6 providers and how they can deploy IPv6 connectivity to customer networks (end sites). This section basically describes the responsibilities of IPv6 providers, the exchange of IPv6 traffic through network access points (NAPs), examples of address space reassignments to customers, routing, and route aggregation by IPv6 providers.

Finally, this chapter discusses the industry support and trends for IPv6 such as the IPv6 Forum, the 3G (Third Generation), and some regional initiatives supported by governments in Asia, Europe, and North America.