Cisco has announced that Free, a part of the French Iliad Group, has deployed the Cisco Carrier-Grade IPv6 Solution using Internet Protocol version 6 rapid deployment technology for more than four million Free residential broadband customers. The Iliad Group (Euronext Paris: ILD) provides telecommunications and Internet access via Free and Alice (4,225,000 ADSL subscribers as of 31 December 2008), Onetel and Iliad Télécom (fixed telephony providers) and IFW (Wiresless Local Loop) in France. This is reportedly the first win for the Cisco 6rd technology.
In 2009 the networking goliath announced the Cisco Carrier-Grade IPv6 Solution using Internet Protocol version 6 rapid deployment technology. At that time LightReading described it as, “significant enhancements to its [Cisco's] Internet Protocol Next-Generation Network (IP NGN) architecture that are designed to secure the foundation of the Internet, which must accommodate the exponential increase of connected devices for highly secure, efficient video delivery and collaboration.” According to LightReading
“new Cisco Carrier-Grade IP Version 6 (IPv6) solution, Cisco helps enable service providers to effectively deal with the bottleneck created by the imminent depletion of IPv4 addresses. This new solution complements Cisco’s IPv6 portfolio, the widest and most extensive in the market. Now spanning from the core of the network to the home, Cisco’s IPv6 capabilities have been expanded and added to a wide range of the company’s routers and switches. Cisco is introducing new carrier-grade IPv6 capabilities to the Cisco CRS-1 Carrier Routing System for the network core and to the Cisco Aggregation Services Routers for the network edge. These new additions provide a cost-effective and efficient means to bridge to a full IPv6 next-generation network while extending the life of existing IPv4 addresses to smoothly manage that migration.
In an interview after the Free announcement Mike Capuano, director of service provider marketing, says upgrading the broadband infrastructure and replacing modems and mobile phones that aren’t IPv6 capable is a major looming challenge. He is quoted in LightReading, “Ideally this would have all been taken care of five years ago,” Capuano says. “But every major service provider is working on it.”
The LightReading article says that volume is a major issue in the consumer world, where there may be millions of end points that need to be replaced, along with infrastructure that has to be upgraded to manage the coming transition. “The CPE [customer premises equipment] in the home is definitely a big issue in terms of the clock and how long this will take… but it’s not limited to those end points, it’s the whole infrastructure,” Capuano says.
In Cisco’s world, the transition to an all-IPv6 world is a three-stage process dubbed; Preserve, Prepare, and Prosper and will take a decade-plus. The Preserve phase is well underway because IPv4 addresses could be used up as early as May 2011 . Capuano says, “we need to preserve the IPv4 address space we have and use it well while we work with service providers to migrate to a hybrid v4/v6 network, which we call the Prepare phase, before we get to an all-v6 network, which we call the Prosper phase.”
There are many ways of preserving IPv4 addresses. Two common ones are IPv6 rapid deployment technology, also known as 6rd, and Large Scale NAT (network address translation), also called LSN. 6rd allows a CPE device such as a modem/router or a mobile phone “to have a v6 address facing inside the home and v4 facing outside to the Internet.” This approach uses IPv6-over-IPv4 tunneling to take the IPv6 packets over an IPv4 infrastructure, terminating on a Cisco ASR 1000 aggregation router, which can then send the IPv6 packet into a data center that has mainly V6 content. The LSN approach pulls network address translation, now done at the edge, into the network. NAT enables one public IPv4 address to be used to support multiple private IPv4 addresses within, a network, thus conserving IPv4 addresses. By doing NAT within the network core, Capuano says, LSN can use one public IPv4 address to support 100 private IPv4 addresses, taking conservation a step farther.
Capuano admits he doesn’t know how many DSL or cable devices or mobile phones will have to be replaced. He does think this is a service provider issue, not a consumer problem. “The consumer shouldn’t care — they just want their applications and service,” he says.
Takashi Arano, Intec NetCore developed this gadget






For example, at the end of the recession that ended in November 1982, the unemployment rate stood at 10.8%. As the chart illustrates, it took two months for the unemployment rate to drop below (and stay below) the recession-end level of 10.8%.


It is noteworthy that, over the past two decades, it has taken much longer (on average) for the unemployment rate to drop below its recession-end level. The reasons for this increased time for the unemployment rate to turn around varies. One explanation that Chart of the Day offers is that following World War II, the US found itself in a strong/dominant economic position. It took time, but eventually many of the remaining world economies began to recover and we are now witnessing increased competition as a result of the rise of the rest.
