[afnog] IPv6 Native Mass Market Deployment arrives in Kenya!

Fri Aug 12 12:02:32 UTC 2016

Very nice and well done!

Are you going to be offering and 6-to-4 type services for only v6
customers?

From: afnog [mailto:afnog-bounces at afnog.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Alston
Sent: 12 August 2016 12:32 PM
To: Mark Tinka <mark.tinka at seacom.mu>; afnog at afnog.org
Subject: Re: [afnog] IPv6 Native Mass Market Deployment arrives in Kenya!

Hi Mark,

There have been some interesting challenges along the way to getting this
working, but for the most part it was surprisingly smooth.

A few caveats that we found along the way.

Firstly, we by default allocate a /48 per customer.  We do this because I
strongly subscribe to the belief that if there is a possibility that
someone may want to subnet, they should get at minimum a /56, and if they
are an enterprise, a /48 is kinda bare minimum.  It was therefore simply
easier to stick to a single prefix length size and go /48 all the way.

The next issue was, enabling the SLAAC to the customer (since that only
works on /64s), and to do this, we're pushing config to the CPE's that
takes a /64 out of the /48 that's routed and automagically puts it on the
LAN interface with SLAAC enabled.  This works perfectly with the CPE's we
are using, and we're testing it with other CPE's to have more variety of
choice of CPE as well.  

Sadly, the CPE's we've seen did NOT do this straight out of the box so we
have to push a config on installation when a new customer connects.

The next biggest issue was customers who for some bizarre reason wanted to
run CPE's behind the CPE's supplied (effectively doing dual-NAT on the
v4), and if those don't support v6 or aren't configured for it, there
isn't a huge amount we can do.

With regards to actual machines picking up the v6 where the above scenario
isn't happening, zero problems, and we're actively seeing a large number
of V6 DNS requests to our DNS servers coming from the customers and we've
seen a massive increase in our V6 traffic levels since enabling this - so
we know for a fact customers are actually using the v6 in fairly large
volumes.  In particular I see a LOT of v6 to Google, Facebook, Amazon AWS,
and various other sites.

So far so good though, but we're constantly monitoring and hopefully in
the next few weeks once we have collected a lot more statistics I'll be
able to share those as well.

Andrew

From: Mark Tinka [mailto:mark.tinka at seacom.mu] 
Sent: 12 August 2016 13:07
To: Andrew Alston <Andrew.Alston at liquidtelecom.com
<mailto:Andrew.Alston at liquidtelecom.com> >; afnog at afnog.org
<mailto:afnog at afnog.org> 
Subject: Re: [afnog] IPv6 Native Mass Market Deployment arrives in Kenya!

Hi Andrew.

Many congratulations. This is, indeed, a major step, and for me, the first
of its kind in eastern and southern Africa (mostly because I'm not sure
how far this is going in northern and western Africa - otherwise I'd say
the whole of Africa).

I've been challenging a number of broadband ISP's and MNO's in Africa in
recent years to put a lot more focus and energy in getting consumers
IPv6-enabled, so to hear that Liquid have succeeded in doing this in Kenya
is very good news, indeed!

It would be good to hear of challenges specifically around customer
devices picking up IPv6 addresses, and potentially running into Happy
Eyeball issues if at all. If you can share that as your experience grows,
it would tell a good story.

Once again, good work, Andrew and your team! I'm quite impressed to hear
this!

Mark.

On 12/Aug/16 11:45, Andrew Alston wrote:

Hi All,

I thought I'd just share this with all of you because I view it as a
fairly major step in the right direction for the continent.

Yesterday, Liquid Telecom turned on IPv6 to all its Kenyan home users
using GPON and our FTTH / FTTB products.  This was done in such a way that
the customers didn't need to configure anything themselves to enable it,
it was just there :)

The CPE's are all pushed a configuration as well to SLAAC enable the LAN
facing interface and doing v6 DNS distribution via ND (though we also have
v6 DHCP serving V6 DNS and other-config-flag set on the ND, so it can get
the v6 DNS via either method if it doesn't honor the other-config-flag)

Though, this is now a challenge to all the other ISP's offering home user
mass market products - v6 works - it's time to start seeing more
deployment :)

We hope to have the v6 turned up shortly in Zimbabwe and other markets in
the next few weeks as well.

Andrew

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