Once upon a time in the not so distant past, a large ISP dominated a country’s
telecommunications market and felt powerful and without competition. Whenever someone
needed to log on to the
Internet they would use their services. Everyone envied their market penetration.
This large ISP, however, had never wanted to deploy IPv6 because they thought their stock
of IP addresses was enough and saw no indicator telling them that they needed the new
protocol.
During the course of those years, another smaller ISP began implementing IPv6 and slowly
began to grow, as they realized that the protocol did indeed make a difference in the eyes of their
clients and that it was helping them win over new users.
The small ISP’s market penetration continued to grow, as did their earnings and general respect
for their services. As they grew, it became easier for them to obtain better equipment, traffic
and interconnection prices. Everything was going very well. The small ISP couldn’t believe that
something as simple as deploying IPv6 could be paying off so spectacularly. Their customers
told them their needs included running VPNs and holding conference calls with partners in
other parts of the world, and that their subsidiaries, customers and business partners in Europe
and Asia had already adopted IPv6.
Despite being so powerful, the large ISP began experiencing internal problems that were
neither billing nor money related. Sales staff complained that they were having trouble closing
many deals because customers had started asking for IPv6 and, although their ISP was so
large and important, they simply did not have IPv6 to offer. Both corporate customers and
residential users were asking for IPv6; even major state tenders were requiring IPv6.
When this started happening, the Sales Manager complained to the Products, Engineering and
Operations departments. The latter were left speechless and some employees were let go by
the company. In the end, Sales did not care where the fault lay – they were simply unable to
gain new customers. Realizing that they were losing customers, some of the salespeople
accepted job offers at the small ISP who was looking to grow their staff as they could now
afford the best sales force.
Then the same thing happened with the larger ISP’s network manager, an expert who knew
a lot about IPv6 but who had been unable to overcome the company’s bureaucracy and bring
the new protocol into production. Logically, the network manager was followed by his trusted
server administrator and head of security. The large ISP couldn’t believe what was happening
right before their very eyes. The sales force hired by the smaller ISP (those who used to
work for the large ISP) brought with them their huge customer base, all of them potential prospects.
A stampede of the large ISP’s clients was on the way. The months went by and the smaller
ISP was no longer simply offering Internet access – its Data Center had grown, major
companies brought in new cache servers and much more. They were now offering co-location,
hosting, virtual hosting, voice and video, among many other services.
When the large provider decided to deploy IPv6, it had to do so very quickly. Things went
wrong; many errors were made. In addition, certain consultants and companies took
advantage of their problems and charged higher rush fees. Network downtime increased,
as did the number of calls to the call center. The large ISP’s reputation started to crumble.
As expected, in the end, everyone who was part of this story – clients and providers alike –
ended up deploying IPv6. Some ended up happier than others, but everyone adopted IPv6
on their networks.
By Alejandro Acosta
