______________________________________________________________________ DRAFT TRANSCRIPT SIG: IPv6 technical Date: Wednesday 1 March 2006 Time: 11.00am Presentations: IPv6 deployment in Latin America and Caribbean Introduction of "Softwires" WG in IETF Presenter: Jordi Palet ______________________________________________________________________ KAZU YAMAMOTO: Thank you very much. So, next speaker is Jordi Palet. He will make two presentations. JORDI PALET: OK, so the first presentation is to introduce the activities we have been carrying out in Latin America and Caribbean, together with LACNIC. Basically, the idea of these activities has been to show the ISPs in the region are not only ISPs but software developers. That IPv6 is not just about more addresses but also about providing new business possibilities because it provides platform for possible innovation. And they can build new obligations and new services that can take advantage of that and probably generate some profit. We also try to show them that the question which IPv6 is not anymore if, but actually when you're going to do that. And the idea was to also show that it's actually better to start as soon as you can and probably it will make it cheaper for you because you can plan instead of trying to do it overnight and it being expensive. Also, going a bit into the technical data - what we have done is basically trying to explain that you need to divide different parts of your network to try to see how to approach this transition. And basically looking to your network which is most of the time basic, the core of the backbone and the access. In most of the cases, if you have already very well maintained backbone, if you have MPLS, you can probably do that very quickly and most of the time in most of the cases is good enough, modern enough so you don't need to do practically anything or maybe just the operating system or whatever. Even most of the time you don't need memory of great, according to the experience we have been doing with several in the region. But the average system has been that case. And also in this network, in the backbones, in Latin America, we have succeeded most of the situations to upgrade the backbone in just a matter of hours practically. We try to explain also in the access network that you have different situations, because depending on technology - for example, we know that today it's not possible to offer native service and the other situation typically is that you have equipment which is not native or is not supporting IPv6 natively and/or even maybe not able to upgrade this right now. Even if this is changing very fast there is also a very important dependence on which products you happen to fill. Despite that, of course you can still do some transition and advantages or the first advantage of IPv6 which is offering connectivity and to related applications which can take advantage of that. It's already able. So what is the rest of this experience? Basically, what is missing, it's basically training. 'New' not necessarily means difficult. The people are usually perceiving like that if something is new. If you don't get one brick out of the wall, you can't see, but after the wall there is nothing, right? So sometimes you need to consider a small or incremental operation on your network or operation and applications and so on. But you need to take advantage of all the new services and applications that this deployment can bring to you. So the steps that we are doing is, of course, helping them. If necessary to request, you can have contact with your providers - a small pilot if necessary. Getting up to deploy IPv6 in their network and even when they are convinced and it is activated in production stage. Curiously, we have a lot of situations where even if we know the provider is IPv6 capable, when somebody in a given country, for example, last week in Mexico, got conducted the provider, the local people said, "IPv-what?" That means that there is misinformation. The local people is not trained enough. So in that case we need to go back to the people in the country and tell the people what they need to do. After that we contact them with the IPv6 in a couple of hours. The local ISPs don't have this contact mostly at the high level. In the big carriers, it is not going to happen, at least not so quickly. So what was the LACNIC situation regarding IPv6? Until June 2005, we had about 18 IPv6 prefixes allocated. Only a few reduced number of them were being mentioned. There was no real usage of IPv6. Almost no, let's say, big interest in the region and no production service available. Maybe some services in research allocation. But very, very few competitive region in the world. So when we started this activity, basically we had one initial activity in Lima and Bogota in January, 2005, and across the rest of the year, we have succeeded to gain over 3,000 people that's key because ISPs are probably not going to get the money back until the services or applications can take advantage of that. What is going to be able to charge for IPv6 because the customers just buy services and obligations. Some of them have been creating local groups, like we call those groups IPv6 in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, and others coming. We got from there 18 prefixes that we have in June, we have 51 prefixes and most of them are already being announced. I don't mean just getting them, but making sure there is some activities going on behind that announcement. And just explain that some of the times we need to follow the chain. If a small ISP come to us to get some help, maybe this ISP is not connected to a big carrier, a big international carrier, but is connected to a medium-size carrier from that country. So we need to convince the national carrier and then go to the upstream provider. There is also a lot of good and interesting feedback from government and organisations like regulators, enterprises, developers, even a lot of information in the press related to all this. So I think the rest is quite interesting. One interesting thing is this division of the IPv6 allocation that is done by RIPE which shows that after this, almost just six months of industry work, right now the space of label in terms of IPv6 addresses comparing of ARIN versus LACNIC is quite impressive. And I didn't make the calculations but I'm sure if I show something going on in IPv6 addresses, the figures could be even more impressive. Let's see what happens in the next six months or one year when I think we'll probably succeed to go to at least double the number of ISPs offering service in Latin America. One additional thing we found in this work is that if the ISPs are connected, I mean Latin America, Caribbean, are provided to upstream providers from Europe, all of them are offering native IPv6 services. And there are quite a few - probably about six or eight different upstream providers that have international service to Latin America, from Europe, and they're providing native IPv6 services. But there are some that hung up from upstream providers in US. And these upstream providers from the US, basically two big ones, they don't have IPv6 service in very nice situations. They are only offering tunnels and most of the time the routing is not, let's say, good enough. So what we also did was we are working together with another organisation, which is OCCAID, which is providing free IPv6 training, but what we are trying to do is try and help with the first steps, when the service is not the same as the original upstream provider. We don't want to compete but we want to compliment until there is a service ready to provide. Basically, if you see which of this ISPs or entities like TLDs in Latin America and Caribbean, you have a few of them, Panama, Portugal, sorry, Brazil, Guatemala. There is a very interesting case that the three ISPs that are of label in Cuba, they didn't succeed to get IPv6 service because the blocking from US, they cannot connect. So we succeed to get a special permission from the North American government because there is a satellite ISP which is Colombian company and based in Miami. So using a Russian satellite we connected them to get IPv6 service natively for them. So very interesting level of deployment. Probably the first country in the world that will be totally connected to IPv6. A very interesting thing. So for those that have interest in OCCAID network, we get two links from different carriers. This is the network we have now. We are extending it to Europe to offer the same service to European ISPs which don't have native service or good quality from their own upstream providers. We are trying to extend it to Asia Pacific and to Africa. In Africa, we already have one point of presence which is still not on this map. Even in North America, the level of this is becoming so interesting that part of the network which was needed to be upgraded because it's already being filled all existing pipes. And I think quickly, but I'm done with this presentation, so we still have five minutes before the other one, we can make questions at the end. OK, I'm probably not going to follow very much these slides but it will be quicker this way. A working group - there are still a lot of transitions. But we don't have enough good transition to make it simple. We have situations where ISPs typically in the access network cannot deploy today IPv6 because I just explain it in the previous explanation, all the network access itself is not providing IPv6. So what we need is to look for a way which is not expensive or even absolutely inexpensive for the ISPs and also for the customers to get IPv6 service in that situation. We have also the reverse situation. This will be the picture. We have a core network, the customer network as well. We have here, just one box is all stuck but at least there will be dual stack. Maybe one or several of the devices in the access network don't support IPv6 and maybe even in the home network is not providing IPv6. So what we want is to make sure in this network, either this device can get upgraded to the stack, or any of the lines can get easily for dual stack. We have the reverse situation. We already have some networks where it's common for whatever reasons to have all this access network or even the core network being only IPv6, but we still have some obligations with regard to IPv4. What we want to achieve is encapsulating IPv4, IPv6 or IPv6 before in an automatic fashion. So this is what Softwires is trying to resolve. Either you have a host or you have even another CPE. And the situation is, we have achieved also a consensus in the last week. In a meeting in Hong Kong last week, this technology is almost there. We don't need to do anything new. We have layer 2 tooling protocol Version 2, Version 3 to achieving this. There are some complications. For example, there is not a prefix delegation. You may need this if you have several hosts in the network to support IPv6. More or less that's the situation with this working group. It has progressed after many years of thinking on that in different working groups. We have achieved probably the rest in less than six months and now it's time to go to get the documents, and I guess that will be really very quick because there is a good consensus in the working group in the way ahead. There is another case which is being studied by this working group. It's a little bit more complicated. This case is being demanded by the China Research Network Information Centre which is only getting funding to work if the network is only IPv6. The difference with the other case, the previous case, the customer has the full route. While in this case, we are talking about full BCP. It seems the solution is quite similar which the extensions, for example, with the multicast and so on. I think more or less that's all. Questions? No questions. I was too quick. Thank you very much. TOMOHIRO FUJISAKI: I think there is - sorry. Not so popular, how many in the area? JORDI PALET: One example of that is the Chinese network, but it's a more complicated model. But also IPv6 only. Another example is at least four big networks in Europe in addition to the networks in the US which are trying to make it happen because the RIPE IPv6 traffic is dominant and they have only allocations which are using the network. I have a concrete example where we have deployed this in Spain with 5,000 schools. There is a similar example in Portugal where 8, 500 schools. Another one in Turkey and there are some others coming. It's not popular now but if you look at the long term - as soon as we have availability of services that support IPv6 and the traffic becomes IPv6 dominant, it will become more useful because at the end, managing a dual stack network may increase the operational cost. If you succeed to, in a transferring way have the core in the access, only the core or the access to support IPv6, in the long term, it could be an organisational factor. KAZU YAMAMOTO: That's all our presentations. Before we conclude with this session, we should take notes again. Morning tea, lunch, afternoon too will be available on Level 2 in the foyer. The APNIC social event - to participate in the APNIC social event, please bring your ticket. Plus we will leave from the Level 1 Plaza Deck, if you don't know where it is, please look on the back of your ticket. Our last bus is 19:10, so please don't miss it. And MyAPNIC and policy flash demo is always available on the APNIC Helpdesk. The helpdesk itself is available at the break times. And lastly, we will have a special session called APNIC fee structures today. So if you are interested in this, please join it. OK. That's all. Any questions or comments to this session? All happy? OK. Let's conclude this session with a big hand. Thank you very much. APPLAUSE