IPv6 Success Stories: Sprint
At the ARIN 51 Public Policy and Members Meeting in April 2023, a panel of five community members who have contributed to the IPv6 case studies on our blog or have other IPv6 deployment experience joined us for a compelling and informative discussion moderated by ARIN President and CEO John Curran. In this IPv6 Success Stories series we’re highlighting the experiences, insights, lessons learned, and tips for successful IPv6 deployment shared by those panelists.
To kick off the IPv6 Success Stories panel, each panelist gave a short presentation to share the history, status, and impact of IPv6 at their organization, what other organizations can learn from their experience, and more to help others take the next steps in their IPv6 journeys.
Gaining Control of Their Destiny
Currently the IPv6 engineer for Johnson & Johnson, Ben Bittfield reviewed the success story from his time at T-Mobile and Sprint and shared a look at plans for the future at Johnson & Johnson. Ben explained how, at Sprint, they progressed through all the phases of migration from IPv4 to IPv6 while trying to keep up with aggressive smartphone adoption: public IP addresses, carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT), dual stack, and eventually the target state of IPv6-only. “Our target state was always a v6-only world, but it took a while to get there,” he said. “We went from a situation where we basically did not control our own destiny … to where, in a v6-only world … we controlled our own destiny again.”
You can read the case study on Sprint’s journey through IPv6 transition mechanisms for more details on that process. Ben concluded his opening statement by sharing his excitement for the future of IPv6. “When I first started at Sprint, we were talking about predominantly tunneling, and … v4 dual stack where you can, tunnel where you must. And now it’s v6-only where you can and dual stack where you must,” he said. “I like that v6-only is not just practical, but it’s in production and it’s out there. And it should be the default going forward, if possible.”