[afnog] plea for increase participation in v6ops/IETF

[JORDI PALET MARTINEZ]

Hello all,

At the last LACNIC event, I mentioned on a couple of occasions the need for ISPs in the region, especially small and medium-sized ones, to participate in the decisions taken in the IETF IPv6 Operations Working Group (v6ops). I’m sending this here as well, as I believe the situation also apply to this region.

When I asked among the attendees how many participate in v6ops, only one person raised his hand.

What does it mean to participate in the mailing list? Follow some emails (sometimes only 1-2 a week, sometimes they can be several in a day), and therefore learn about what is being discussed and give your opinion and, given that decisions are made by Consensus, influence them.

What consequences has NOT participating? That decisions against your interests/opinions could be taken, and obviously do not consider your perspective in the standards. Generally large operators are involved, which implies that your interests are not sufficiently represented, and in general are contrary to yours. Your "vote/opinion" is not worth more than yours, but the big one is present and the small/medium NO!

I give you a very concrete example. The serious problem that small and medium ISPs have, is to continue offering IPv6 and IPv4 services to their customers, when they already do not have IPv4 addresses. Only the biggest ISPs have a great purchasing power and can influence the manufacturers to do for them what they need. One possibility to solve it, extending the life of IPv4, but not necessarily deploying IPv6, is using CGN, which is also very expensive, and breaks many things.

The solution is simple. Deploying IPv6-only services in the last mile, which involves using transition mechanisms, such as 464XLAT that has been deployed on millions of smartphones worldwide, so that applications continue to operate transparently as they "believe" they have IPv4.

What is the problem, then? That manufacturers of CPEs are based on an old specification (RFC7084) that does not contemplate these transition mechanisms, so when a small/medium ISP asks a manufacturer for a firmware upgrade or a new CPE, they do not include that solution and perhaps they offer it with an extra cost.

In my view, this should change, and that is why I am working on a number of documents, including RFC7084-bis (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-v6ops-rfc7084-bis/), To update this situation, but there is opposition from large ISPs and virtually no small/medium "talks" about it, and in fact these large ISPs deny the situation. In addition, the document also specifies the "automated" support of those cases in which the user installs other routers (which is very common as we all know, and will be more and more in IPv6, IoT, etc.), behind the router installed by the ISP, through homenet (HNCP).

I am not asking for your support for my documents, but for understanding the problem and the solution that is being proposed and/or possible new ones, and for the opinion of not only those very few “big ones”, but also of many small and medium, who are most affected.

If you want to subscribe to this list, search for "subscribing" at:
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/v6ops

You can see the files of the discussion in:
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/search/?email_list=v6ops

I remind you that participating in the IETF does not require a presence in the meetings, as consensus is agreed in the list.

Regards,
Jordi










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