Two weeks we
published this article, in which we looked at the status of IPv6 deployment worldwide. We saw that by looking at the number of networks (Autonomous Systems) that announce both IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes, the global IPv6 deployment rate is around 8%.
In this article we’ll take a close look at IPv6 deployment in Canada. From the previous article we know that Canada has an IPv6 deployment rate of 8%, which is the same as the global average. It is however significantly lower than for example New Zealand, Japan and many European countries.
Residential IPv6 services in Canada
Today TekSavy, an independent Canadian service provider, is the only ISP in Canada offering
experimental IPv6 services to customers. This is pretty much a global trend, as we see most IPv6 deployments and service offerings are mainly offered by large carriers, down to regional ISP’s, business providers and lastly residential users.
The reason for this is easy, high costs. Customer premise equipment (CPE), i.e. cable/ DSL modems provided by residential providers, are typically low end devices. They do not support newer technologies such as IPv6 or even the use DNSSEC. As a result, in order to provide IPv6 services to residential users all of the routers/modems at the customer have to be replaced. This of course is a significant investment for the providers. In the core of these provider networks, more high-end and typically more modern equipment is used, the majority of these routers have supported IPv6 for quite a while.
So if IPv6 development mainly happens in the core, let’s take a look at the Canadian IP Transit market and how IPv6 has change the market relationships. We’ll start by taking a look at the IPv4 market followed by more detailed analyses of the IPv6 market.
Top 10 IPv4 providers
Let’s first take a look at the view of the Canadian transit market with our IPv4 glasses on. For those familiar with the Canadian market, the list below contains few surprises. The list consists of major Canadian Telco’s and Cable providers as well as most of the global Tier1 providers.
According to the table below Cogent the leads the pack, by providing transit to 159 Canadian networks (autonomous systems). However we should probably take into account that AS577 (Bell Canada) and AS6539 (GT-BELL) are both owned by Bell. After GT, Group Telecom, was bought by Bell both networks operated as separate networks, but they’re all Bell customers. Having said that, the real market leader is bell with 197 transit customers.
From the list below the only Transit provider that’s not a Telco / Cable or Tier1 provider is Peer1. Peer1 is a hosting / transit provider based out of Vancouver and provides transit to 49 Canadian Networks.
The table below shows a list of providers that provide IPv4 Transit to Canadian IPv4 networks.
Num of Customers |
AS number |
Network Name |
159 |
174 |
COGENT Cogent/PSI |
113 |
577 |
BACOM - Bell Canada |
105 |
15290 |
ALLST-15290 - Allstream Corp. |
102 |
852 |
ASN852 - Telus Advanced Communications |
88 |
3356 |
LEVEL3 Level 3 Communications |
84 |
6539 |
GT-BELL - Bell Canada |
84 |
6327 |
SHAW - Shaw Communications Inc. |
64 |
701 |
UUNET - MCI Communications Services, Inc. d/b/a Verizon Business |
63 |
3257 |
TINET-BACKBONE Tinet SpA |
57 |
6453 |
GLOBEINTERNET TATA Communications |
50 |
3549 |
GBLX Global Crossing Ltd. |
49 |
13768 |
PEER1 - Peer 1 Network Inc. |
Top IPv6 providers
Now let’s take a look at the Canadian transit market with our IPv6 glasses on. The situation now looks quite different. The first thing to notice is that non of the Canadian Telco’s or Cable providers are represented in this list. With the exception of Peer1 and Canarie this list has no Canadian providers at all.
Hurricane Electric is the market leader in the Canadian IPv6 Market. No real surprise, as they are the global leader. Globally, Hurricane Electric provides transit to three times as many networks as the runner up Global Crossing. Other major players are AS3257 Tinet (formerly known as
Tiscali), Tata, Global Crossing, Level3 and NTT America.
The only Canadian Transit networks on this list are Peer1 and AS6509, Canarie. Canarie is the Canadian Research and Education (R&E) network, comparable to for example Internet2 in the US and Geant/Dante in Europe. Although TATA communication has some Canadian roots (it used to be TeleGlobe) It’s fair to say that the Canadian IPv6 transit market is dominated by non Canadian companies, specifically large global carriers.
In fact most of the Canadian transit providers that are market leaders in IPv4 do not provide transit to
any IPv6 network (Telus, Bell, Allstream). The exceptions are Peer1 (providing transit to 271/BCNET, 11290/ Cogeco Cable and 36483/ gossamer Threads) and Shaw that provides transit to AS271/BCNET.
The table below shows a list of providers that provide IPv6 Transit to Canadian IPv6 networks.
Num of Customers |
AS number |
Network Name |
36 |
6939 |
HURRICANE - Hurricane Electric, Inc. |
16 |
3257 |
TINET-BACKBONE Tinet SpA |
12 |
6453 |
GLOBEINTERNET TATA Communications |
6 |
6509 |
CANARIE-NTN - Canarie Inc |
4 |
3549 |
GBLX Global Crossing Ltd. |
4 |
3356 |
LEVEL3 Level 3 Communications |
4 |
2914 |
NTT-COMMUNICATIONS-2914 - NTT America, Inc. |
3 |
6762 |
SEABONE-NET TELECOM ITALIA SPARKLE S.p.A. |
3 |
13768 |
PEER1 - Peer 1 Network Inc. |
3 |
174 |
COGENT Cogent/PSI |
3 |
4436 |
AS-NLAYER - nLayer Communications, Inc. |
2 |
15412 |
FLAG-AS Flag Telecom Global Internet AS |
Research and Education
Research and Education (R&E) networks globally have been early adaptors and in Canada Canarie is no exception as they have been running IPv6 for many years. If we zoom in a little more into the Canadian R&E community we see that in the world of IPv4, fourteen Canadian networks appear behind AS6509 (Canarie). In the world of IPv6 that’s seven networks. This would make for a score of 50% in our IPv6 deployment scale. Significantly better than the average Canadian Ipv6 deployment score of 8%.
IPv4 |
IPv6 |
Origin AS |
Network Name |
Yes |
Yes |
271 |
BCNET-AS - BCnet |
Yes |
Yes |
376 |
RISQ-AS - Reseau Interordinateurs Scientique Quebecois (RISQ) |
Yes |
No |
611 |
CANET11-AS - University of Toronto |
Yes |
No |
841 |
CANET2-ASN - Canadian Research Network |
Yes |
Yes |
2884 |
NAP-THREE - RA-NAP |
Yes |
No |
3359 |
U-ALBERTA - University of Alberta |
Yes |
Yes |
7860 |
UPEI-AS - University of Prince Edward Island |
Yes |
Yes |
8111 |
DALUNIV - Dalhousie University |
Yes |
No |
10965 |
MRNET - MRNet |
Yes |
No |
10972 |
NF-CANET2 - Memorial University, NF CAnet 2 gigaPOP |
Yes |
Yes |
15296 |
NETERA - Netera Alliance Inc. |
Yes |
No |
26300 |
SASK-RESEARCH-NETWORK - SRNet Saskatchewan Research Network Inc. |
Yes |
Yes |
26677 |
ORION-ASN - ORANO |
Yes |
No |
26806 |
SASK-RESEARCH-NETWORK-2 - SRNet Saskatchewan Research Network Inc. |
Please keep in mind that these results are based on BGP data, this means that if the AS is not visible in the data, it’s considered as not IPv6 ready. If a network uses provider aggregated address space, the actual more specific might not be visible because of aggregation. In those cases the networks will be considered as not IPv6 ready.
Conclusion
The good news for Canada is that compared to the rest of the world, Canada’s IPv6 deployment ratio of 8% is on par with the global average. It’s however significantly lower than countries it normally likes to compare itself with.
Traditionally the IP Transit market in Canada was heavily dominated by Canadian Companies. However these companies have missed the boat in the new world of IPv6. Most of the IPv6 ready Canadian networks are now forced to by transit from the larger global carriers. As more and more transit RFP’s have IPv6 as a mandatory requirement, this could very well result in loss of IPv4 customers as well.
8 comments
TekSavvy is certainly not the only ISP in Canada doing IPv6 to customers… I think they were just the only one asked. Certainly there are plenty of “closet converters” out there who simply don’t announce their upgrade of service if only because it’s difficult to market something which is relatively obscure to residential customers.
My company is a regional Cable provider (one of only a couple dozen remaining in the country I believe) and I offer Internet service to my customers with native IPv6 and IPv4 via NAT. In my case the cost for deploying IPv6 at my scale is trivial, and upgrading CPE is a matter of course in this industry.
Testing in the UK, Germany and I think it was Sweden even showed many CPE even prevent DNSSEC from working. Just have a look at this: http://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-60/presentations/Dietrich-DNSSEC_Support_by_Home_Routers_in_Germany.pdf
So I’m afraid it will be a long time before operating systems and browsers will enable DNSSEC queries by default atleast for as long as we don’t get a big effort replacing all the CPE with IPv6-capable CPE.
With regards to IPv6 ready residential providers in Canada. This is based on information I could find online, website, forum, mailinglists etc. Does you company public advertise that it’s supporting IPv6? If so I’d be happy to add this SP to the list.
Bell, Telus, and Shaw all seem to have v6 peering in place. Shaw with multiple routes and Bell and Telus with direct peering to Tata.
http://bgp.he.net/AS577
http://bgp.he.net/AS852
http://bgp.he.net/AS6327
Hi Jason,
you’re correct they all announce IPv6 networks, and have some peerings.
However Both Telus and Bell have only one IPv6 peer (upstream) and both have no downstream IPv6 peers, i.e. no transit customers.
Shaw is better connected (more Upstream) and has one downstream customer.
I believe it’s also important to realize that announcing a prefix in IPv6 is a long way from offering IPv6 services to your customers.
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