HEAnet

Established in 1984 by the seven major universities with the support of the Higher Education Authority to promote the interchange of information electronically within third level education, it plays a critical role in establishing Ireland as a global centre of excellence in Internet activity. Since its formation, the HEAnet community has grown five-fold to over 40 organisations that include almost every Irish third-level institutions.

Today it is one of the largest Internet Service Providers in the country, though it is exclusively geared to meet the needs of the academic and research community through the highest quality telecommunications links and value added Internet services. Initially directed by a voluntary Network Management Committee, HEAnet was incorporated in 1997 as a not-for-profit limited company run by a Chief Executive with full-time staff. The Board of Directors comprises representatives of the HEA, the Government, third level institutions and the user community.

The significant, and growing, costs of operating a national network that provides onward connectivity to the Internet are met largely from charges to members according to their level of usage, in addition to grants and other assistance for specific projects. In terms of IPv6 usage in HEAnet 150,000 students, academics and researchers now have the option of accessing the Internet over the next generation Internet protocol IPv6, following deployment of the new protocol across HEAnet's high-speed network. This service, a first for Ireland, allows HEAnet users to access services running over IPv6 within HEAnet and abroad as a routine aspect of their network connectivity.

In addition to delivering next generation technology, HEAnet's IPv6 service delivers significant cost and technical benefits as it is delivered over existing equipment and infrastructure, providing maximum available performance in a simple and cost-effective manner. Regular services run by HEAnet such as web hosting, software mirroring and e-mail are all available over both IPv4 and IPv6.

The IPv6 deployment phase has been performed with a view to stimulating and supporting deployment in industry and as a direct result of this HEAnet expects to shortly take delivery of a dual-stacked Internet Transit service from a large Tier 1 provider operating in Dublin, having pushed Ireland to the top of the schedule for the rollout of this service.

Following methodical planning and development phases, HEAnet has been providing production level IPv6 services throughout its network since 2003. The protocol is supported throughout the core network, at all access points of presence (PoPs), and through peerings with other networks in Ireland, in the rest of Europe, in North America and elsewhere. At present, we have three institutions connected via native IPv6 (dual stacked with their IPv4 connectivity) and four institutions with IPv6 tunnel connections.

Approximately 1% of the traffic in HEAnet is IPv6 at present. HEAnet publishes a status matrix [HEAnet 2005] that shows various metrics for the uptake of IPv6 within HEAnet, as well as in other NRENs in Europe.

HEAnet was among the very first RIPE clients to support the IPv6 implementation of the Test Traffic Measurement service1 HEAnet has also acted as a developer of IPv6 software. They have developed the current IPv6 implementations for Apache, NSD and more. They have also added IPv6 multicast support to the Apache Portable Runtime, and have organised IPv6 programming training in-house.

HEAnet have also developed their own testing tools, such as multicast netcat which has full ASM and SSM IPv6 Multicast support. Their work and experience have helped to diagnose an array of obscure IPv6 implementation bugs ranging from the IPv6 sendfile bug on Linux (TCP checksum offloading bugs) to Cisco CEF bugs. Staff in HEAnet have demonstrated a proven ability in finding and diagnosing problems.

HEAnet is involved with SixXS, and also provides a 6to4 relay. These services help to promote IPv6 more widely and to provide transition mechanisms to a large amount of users in the country, whether they are in HEAnet or not.

http://www.heanet.ie