[afnog] IPv6 Progress

Thu Aug 1 13:26:30 UTC 2013

Much of this is very true. For example, the IPv4 space in the US has pretty much been exhausted for years. Back when I was at Naval Research Lab in Washington DC, in 1990-1993 time frame, we had this magical "push" to move to IPv6. It was going to be the greatest thing since the dawn if IP itself. But, as luck would have it, the government folks were not educated enough (I suppose that's the proper way to say it) regarding the newer protocol and, as the project(s) progressed, they also realized that not all devices would readily 'speak IPv6.' Additionally, this wonderful idea of NATting came about, and with that capability, IPv4 could (and can), effectively, live forever.

Now, what was not foreseen was that, as more and more people NAT, eventually with B-to-B and even Private-to-Business VPNs, various NATted addresses will begin to collide.
I'm sure you may know what I mean but, here's an example.

Some time ago, around 1994-1996, at a company I worked for, Willis Corroon (formerly Willis Faber of the UK, now known as Willis), we experimented with VPN.
Well, at some point, we may have chosen an internal NAT range of 10.20.x.x for our company network (that's fictional, but it will serve the example).
When some of our employees were at hotels, they would make the VPN connection, and then get all sorts of conflicts, DNS problems, etc.
Well, it so happened that various of the conferences and hotels also had chosen 10.20.x.x range for their hosts so, when they happened to have a hotel server with ip 10.20.2.2 and our DNS server also had that same 10.20.2.2 ip address... you get the picture - major IP address collisions happened (i.e., address overlap).

So there you have yet another valid example of how NAT will not necessarily suffice for servicing all IP needs in the IPv4 arena.

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Jeff Mason, MCSE, BBA CIS
Systems Administrator
Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency
615-780-7031
jmason at nashville-mdha.org
Nashville, Tennessee, US

-----Original Message-----
From: afnog-bounces at afnog.org [mailto:afnog-bounces at afnog.org] On Behalf Of Mark Tinka
Sent: Wednesday, July 31, 2013 4:23 PM
To: Seun Ojedeji
Cc: afnog at afnog.org
Subject: Re: [afnog] IPv6 Progress

On Wednesday, July 31, 2013 07:51:41 AM Seun Ojedeji wrote:

> > Sure they wouldn’t if it will not bring a few $ out of their budget 
> > ;-)

By non-technical users I meant eye balls, not the bean counters.

> Yes and No :-) if the provider can still meet up with his customer 
> needs(which is largely content related) on v4 then the pressure for v6 
> may not be necessarily a pressure but a need.

Yes, but your assumption is that the operator is able to obtain a pool of public IPv4 space, which is true in Africa and Latin America (for now), but less so in other regions, particular the Asia Pacific and Europe/Middle East.

Also, content is not as "king" as it used to be. There is probably more traffic in Twitter and Facebook than reading your daily paper, but this is not an empirical assertion.

> > Yeah because those contents are dual-stacked, how about if they were
> 
> native on v6

I think you mean single-stacked (for IPv6) only.

I don't care if a box is single-stacked or dual-stacked, as long as it has IPv6.

Dual-stacking will make sense until new servers can only be single-stacked, due to not having anymore IPv4 space.

> > Okay now maybe we use a scenario; here am i in Nigeria sending this 
> > mail
> 
> through a mobile network that has over 40million users, and YES the 
> network is being NATed. So how much growth do you think will be 
> required to move such an operator?

The pressure I'm talking about from user growth is in markets that will have run out of IPv4 space.

Operators will NAT and do all sorts of things to keep IPv4 around, until at some point, it becomes too complicated to do so. How long that will take is an exercise left up to the readers, but I ultimately think that is what will drive adoption.

We are not seeing this in Africa yet because our IPv4 pool is still large. It's not enough to NAT, you also need a reasonably large public pool to NAT on to, otherwise you end up with scaling issues on TCP and UDP port scope per address.

> My other question will be; does anyone know a mobile operator running 
> public IP to normal mobile users at the moment in Africa? if none, 
> what are the reasons why they are not deploying v4 especially since 
> its still very much available; could one of the reason be that they 
> want to leverage on the "security myth" that is associated with NAT?

Globally, the "unrestricted" APN provides public IP addresses so that users can host services behind their 3G connections.

I know Vodacom, Cell-C and MTN have them here in South Africa (as do Vodafone in the UK). Can't speak to other places.

> If some actually exist(which i am looking forward to knowing), why are 
> they not deploying v6; could one of the reasons be because their 
> clients are currently happy with access to content. Could it also be 
> the actual cost of deploying v6 for such a huge mobile network which 
> had mostly v4 only devices?

For mobile operators, there are two big issues:

	1. Time to market; with that many users, they always
	   need to deliver solutions NOW. So it's easier for
	   them to justify sending US$40,000,000 on big
 	   LSN's than diverting that money into IPv6
  	   deployment.

	2. IPv6 support on mobile phones is a huge problem.
	   Check these out to see the kind of issues at
	   play:

https://sites.google.com/site/tmoipv6/lg-mytouch
http://wiki.nuevasync.com/wiki/bin/view/Public/deviceIpv6Support

> Well maybe the user growth will help on the long run but definitely 
> not in near future.

I'm not looking at a quick win - the long term plan is certainly based on user demand in regions that have no more
IPv4 space.

This is why I focus on NAT64, because it's easy to get rid of that without re-engineering the Access.

Mark.

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