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

[Andrew Alston]

Hi Saul,

It's something we have been playing with, but we're not convinced yet that things are quite ready for it.  Sadly, there is still a LOT of equipment in the home scenario that doesn't do v6 at all (This is particularly the case with a lot of smart tv's for example, especially with the prevelance of Samsung Smart TV's in this part of the world, and yes, I'm naming and shaming here!)

Andrew


From: Saul Stein [mailto:saul at enetworks.co.za]
Sent: 12 August 2016 15:03
To: Andrew Alston <Andrew.Alston at liquidtelecom.com>; Mark Tinka <mark.tinka at seacom.mu>; afnog at afnog.org
Subject: RE: [afnog] IPv6 Native Mass Market Deployment arrives in Kenya!

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<mailto:mark.tinka at seacom.mu>>; afnog at afnog.org<mailto: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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