FPT Telecom’s IPv6 journey

By on 16 Aug 2017

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FPT Telecom is the largest private telecommunication and Internet service provider in Viet Nam. Founded in 1988 by 13 young scientists, FPT Telecom now employs nearly 7,000 people, including over 2,000 technical engineers, programmers and technology specialists.

In 2011, FPT Telecom committed to transitioning to IPv6, a journey that took five years and many hours of dedication from technical staff.

FPT Telecom has generously shared its experience, and the lessons learned, to help the Asia Pacific technical community in its deployment of the next generation of Internet addressing.

Follow each step of the FPT Telecom IPv6 journey below in the interactive timeline, and listen to commentary from APNIC’s George Michaelson and Sheryl Hermoso, on this successful IPv6 deployment.


FPT Telecom IPv6 deployment — an interactive timeline

(Use side arrows to navigate timeline)

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Last IPv4 block from APNIC

2011

FPT requested and received one more /13 block from APNIC, equivalent to 500,000 addressable hosts. At the time it had almost 600,000 active users. This block quickly ran out.

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Joined "National Action Plan about IPv6" of Ministry of Information & Communications

March 2011

FPT starts discussing IPv6. According to its business plan, they must increase Concurrent Users (CCU) between 27-30% each year. Mr Tu Vu Anh (Chief Technical Officer) decides to transition to IPv6 after consultation with the NOC team and executive. "We were not eligible for any more IPv4 from APNIC and VNNIC, so we had to implement IPv6 as soon as possible and release more IPv4," said Mr Luong Duy Phuong, Vice Director - NOC. At this stage, there was no technical transition plan but FPT forecast two years for testing IPv6.

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6PE

January 2013

Because FPT had an MPLS core, they chose to deploy 6PE on the core router (RFC 4798).  “This approach was easy for us; the process was simple. We referred to other vendors that also used 6PE to access IPv6, and worked closely with Juniper," says Luong Duy Phuong.

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Tests start and questions arise

April 2013

FPT undertook IPv6 testing with Internet, IPTV and IP telephony. "This raised many questions: Which technology should we go with? Address Stateless or stateful? Should we start with NAT64 or dual stack? How should we delegate IP ranges in the customer facing LAN? By DHCPv6, or by Stateless Autoconfiguration, or by 6rd?… Does it matter if the delegated prefix changes each time a CPE reconnects to the BNG? What happens to prefix and address based accounting? We tested all technologies possible and compared. We also worked with our vendor to learn how other ISPs had deployed. During testing, we discovered Microsoft, MAC OS and Linux all support NDRA as default, so we decided to go with NDRA addressing in LAN side,” said Luong Duy Phuong.

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PPPoE

August 2013

FPT chose PPPoE dual stack and worked closely with its CPE supplier to make sure CPE worked as expected. “This approach was easy for us to deploy because we already used PPPoE for our broadband service. Our supplier worked very closely with us to solve any CPE issues,” said Luong Duy Phuong.

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Trial and error with CPE firmware

October 2013

FPT tested CPE firmware for compatibility with its BNG IPv6. "We tested PPPoE on our CPE, using test-ipv6.com to confirm behaviours of download, upload, websurfing over a 2-day interval. We tested PPPoE reconnection, to confirm how IPv6 coped with address re-delegation," said Luong Duy Phuong.

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Training of frontline staff

December 2013

FPT undertook internal training for its customer call centre and onsite engineers — a total of 40 people over two weeks.

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First release of CPE firmware

December 2014

"We started a small customer trial with randomly chosen participants. At first it was only 100 - 200 users; we increased this sample after a week with no issues. At one point, CPE had a bug: it was not stable with IPv6 PD and did not resolve DNSv6, some CPE lost connection with BNG. Customers complained but we had a backup plan. We switched IPv6 off immediately until the issue was resolved. We captured a log at CPE and worked with our CPE provider to have them fix it," said Luong Duy Phuong.

Second release of CPE firmware

April 2015

“We started a larger customer trial: this time we reached almost 80,000 CCU. But we noticed the CPE had another issue. Some CPE didn't re-establish the IPv6 session with our BNG. We captured packets at the BNG, and the CPE for diagnostics, and worked with the CPE vendor on a fix,” said Luong Duy Phuong.

CPE release beta firmware

December 2015

“We decided to expand the scope of the experiment to 100,000 CCU. We enabled IPv6 on the CPE via TR-069" said Luong Duy Phuong. "Our customers complained of a slow connection to some websites. So, we rolled back and found the root cause. There was a ICMP rate limit on the BNG line cards. When a computer negotiated with the other end they agreed to use MTU1500. The MTU between the BNG and the CPE was only 1470 bytes, and IPv6 doesn't support fragmentation along the path (only the endpoints can perform fragmentation in IPv6 unlike IPv4). When the BNG saw the oversize packets it was sending ICMP 'packet too big' (PTB) unreachable messages to the other end of the session, and with a lot of CPE, this caused the BNG to send a lot of ICMP, reaching the rate limit configured. The loss of ICMP PTB caused the TCP session to be torn down with loss of connectivity between the two endpoints in TCP,” he added.

CPE release final firmware

February 2016

FPT Telecom successfully deployed IPv6 with over five types of FPT modems (including GPON, EPON, ADSL and for the intranet); built IPv6 firewalls; and connected with Google, Facebook and many other websites via IPv6 protocol with 60 Gbps of average traffic and 91,200 customers.

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Encountering a Radius issue

April 2016

“At this time we reached almost 100,000 CCU. Unfortunately, our Radius couldn't handle any more IPv6 subscribers, so we needed to find another solution. We redesigned IPv6 assignments addresses for customers. Before general deployment, we were assigning an IPv6 prefix for each customer, through Radius. But in general deployment it cost too much memory and caused Radius to fail. Now, the BNG assigns the IPv6 prefix and it changes on customer re-connection. The IPv6 prefix assignment is 'ephemeral'," said Luong Duy Phuong.

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Expands Data Centre

June 2016

FPT Telecom expanded its data centre with Uptime Tier III certification and an area of nearly 6,000 sqm, which can house a total of 800 rack cabinets. This infrastructure allows FPT Telecom to deploy IPv6 on a larger scale.

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Announcement

September 2016

FPT Telecom publicly announces it will offer IPv6 services to households and businesses with broadband Internet. FPT reaches over 800,000 CCU in four months.

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Launched IPTV service on IPv6 only platform

December 2016

A successful and smooth launch gave 600,000 subscribers IPTV on IPv6.

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Focus on connection and service quality.

2017

IPv6/IPv4 dual-stack for 800,000 FTTH customers. “Our target is migration 100% CCU to dual stack. We are still working on it. Now, ratio IPv6 / IPv4 is 0.67,” said Luong Duy Phuong.

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Last IPv4 block from APNIC

Joined "National Action Plan about IPv6" of Ministry of Information & Communications

6PE

Tests start and questions arise

PPPoE

Trial and error with CPE firmware

Training of frontline staff

First release of CPE firmware

Second release of CPE firmware

CPE release beta firmware

CPE release final firmware

Encountering a Radius issue

Expands Data Centre

Announcement

Launched IPTV service on IPv6 only platform

Focus on connection and service quality.

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