Hi,
I can fill in a bit more of the gaps of what's happening behind the scenes but can't give you any timescales as yet as not everything has been scheduled in.
The work we need to do will split down into a number of different areas:
CPE
Broadband Access Network
Core Network
Transit and Peering
OSS and CRM systems (including VMBU)
DNS
RADIUS
Plusnet hosted services (email, website, homepages, etc.)
And everything else not listed above
The core network is done, we have transit and peering in place, a few more bits to do and the broadband access network is set up as we have people using it. DNS and RADIUS as well as building the backend support into the OSS and CRM systems are the next biggies to do and part of the reason why the trial is limited to a set of test logins for now.
From CPE we're talking to our suppliers about IPv6 support, the Netgear WNR1000 and Netgear WNR3500 that we supply on FTTC and FTTP and the Technicolor TG582n should all be fine once the IPv6 firmwares are ready. Technicolor TG789vn that we supplied in FTTP has a beta IPv6 firmware already and we've tested that on the trial without issues (other than working out what settings to change).
We're still talking to Technicolor about the TG585v8 and are hopeful we can have IPv6 support on it but it's working out what can and can't be done and whether anything has to be left out to get it in. TG585v7 can't support IPv6.
Things are moving in the right direction, we have a lot of work to do though so it will take time. In parallel to IPv6 there's also Carrier Grade NAT being looked at. We know that there will come a point where we can't get any more IPv4 addresses, we know what our projections for IPv4 are and we can make assumptions about what our IPv6 take-up will be like. But there will be places on the Internet that only have IPv4 and no IPv6 and there will be places on the Internet that only have IPv6. There will also be devices that don't support IPv6. New PCs with Windows 7 and Mac OS X will be fine but some older stuff won't be and some games consoles and other devices don't have IPv6 support currently (some may never). As such even if IPv6 is widespread a lot of people are still going to need IPv4. We're planning on running everything dual stack so users will be able to be allocated both a v4 and v6 address. Given that this is likely to be the case for a very long time (several years at least) some people will be allocated a CG-NAT address. How exactly that will work and who will get what type of address has yet to be decided but it's all part of our IPv6 strategy.
Dave Tomlinson
Enterprise Architect - Network & OSS
Plusnet Technology
