this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2025
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What does an ISP need to do in order to support IPv6? (lemmy.ca)
submitted 1 month ago by UntouchedWagons@lemmy.ca to c/networking@sh.itjust.works
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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?

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[โ€“] jake_jake_jake_@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Certain equipment need to support IPv6 in certain ways, but not necessarily be assigned a v6 address. Anything OSI layer-2 or layer-1 will not need to "explicitly" support v6, with exceptions. The network terminal (ONT/modem) usually needs to support v6, as they will generally have security features to prevent a subscriber from using random addresses they were not assigned, or using multiple.

At a minimum, core/edge routing supporting v6, premise equipment supporting v6, at least one upstream provider or transit provider that supports v6 in combination with diverse peering with v6, and ancillary servers to provide DHCPv6 and DNS6. Generally I would assume a provider adding v6 is going to do dual stack, which is great for usually not being NATed on at least one IP stack.

What's nice about v6 being so old.. is that a lot of the equipment they are using will support v6. Most consumer routers just need to get a dhcp reply with v6 with default settings.

We are deploying v6 to both brand new fiber customers and very legacy dsl customers without widespread equipment replacement now, at a US based ISP, but I don't work at Bell or have any idea of what other hurdles they may have that we don't.