Fix6 – IPv6 News and info

APNIC has historically allocated new addresses from IANA when their pool size has been about 2 x /8. Their pool recently got below that number so we can assume that we will see an allocation of 2 x /8 from IANA to APNIC soon.

All the RIR’s pool will be pretty well filled after this allocation. The sum of all the RIR’s and the various pool will be about 21.5 x /8. This is a historically high number. I don’t expect to see any allocations for a while until ARIN and APNIC would have to refill their pool in the November/December time frame.

After that I would expect RIPE and APNIC to allocate in February of 2011 and then finally AfriNIC snatching the last block from the IANA pool somewhere March/April of next year.

Source:  The IPv4 Depletion site

By offering public and private IPv6 addresses, Qwest (NYSE: Q) is cashing in on the emerging opportunity to help enterprise and government agencies make their respective transitions from IPv4 to IPv6 addressing.

Current Qwest iQ networking service customers will be able to leverage the new IPv6 capabilities, including built-in security and its “near-endless” supply of IP addresses. Customers can run IPv4 and/or IPv6 addresses via either a dual stack or native IPv6 modes.

More from Fierce Telecom…

People have asked me to provide a graph, similar to Hustons figure 30 Here is one http://www.ipv4depletion.com/endgame.png. The main differences are are that I’m not providing any historical data. Everything you see is the predictions moving forward. This makes it possible for me to zoom in more.What you are seeing is a stretched out version of the bottom right corner of Huston’s graph, from the vertical red line to the end of the graph. My graph ends when the first RIR gets depleted. The graphs will be updated daily automatically. Source: http://ipv4depletion.com/

Here is an explanation if you are curios why the predicted depletion date was moved to an earlier date all of the sudden. APNIC made some very large allocations yesterday.

• China Mobile allocated a quarter of the 223/8 netblock. This equals about 4 million addresses and the addresses were in the range 223.64.0.0 – 223.127.255.255.
• China Telecom allocated about 750 thousand addresses to the Shanxi province in the ranges 1.68.0.0 – 1.71.255.255 and 223.8.0.0 – 223.15.255.255. Additionally they allocated about half a million addresses to the MeiMengGu province in the range 1.180.0.0 – 1.183.255.255 a few days ago.
• NTTDoCoMo in Japan allocated the range 1.72.0.0 – 1.79.255.255 or about ½ million addresses.

Source: http://ipv4depletion.com

T-Mobile USA has launched an IPv6 web site -- http://ipv6.t-mobile.com/. Only the front page (including images and CSS) is reachable over IPv6; most of the links are broken or redirect to the IPv4-only site. Clearly, it's still a work-in-progress.

This appears to be a futher development in their IPv6 strategy announced at Google's IPv6 Implementors Conference few weeks ago. (Btw, the conference was quite good; hats off to Erik, Lorenzo, and the rest of the Google team.)

T-Mobile USA makes heavy use of NAT44 and bogon addresses. Going forward, this isn't sustainable. So they've decided that future cellular deployments will be IPv6-only, with NAT64 to access the "legacy" IPv4 Internet (slides | video). Yes, NAT is bad, but this approach is the least-bad of the alternatives. There's still only one layer of NAT, it gets IPv6 on a large number of end nodes, and IPv6-enabled content (Google, Netflix, Facebook, etc) isn't NAT'ed at all. Over time, less traffic should flow through the NAT64 boxes as more content is IPv6-enabled. T-Mobile USA suspects they can run 50% of their cellular data traffic over IPv6 by the end of 2011 (apparently they send a lot of traffic to Google and Facebook).

On a personal note, it was very entertaining to hear Cameron Byrne from T-Mobile USA repeatedly tell content providers, "Our users are going to access your content over IPv6. The only relevant question is 'will we make the AAAA record or will you?' Wouldn't you rather be the one to do it so you have control?" After the fourth or fifth time it sunk in: These folks are serious.

This is an even gutsier move than Verizon. VZ is dual-stacking their LTE network and mandating IPv6 support on all devices. Let's hope T-Mobile is really good at running large-scale NATs.

Source:  http://www.personal.psu.edu/dvm105/blogs/ipv6/2010/06/t-mobile-is-pushing-ipv6-hard.html

Last week, the I root DNS server turned on IPv6. Currently, it's only enabled at the Stockholm node.

Here's a Google Map showing locations of IPv6-enable DNS root servers. Global nodes are in red; local nodes in blue:

View Larger Map

Almost all of the DNS roots now have at least some of their nodes IPv6-enabled. Unfortunately, they see very little traffic over IPv6. The H root, for example, sees only about 3% of their traffic over IPv6. This is an improvement over 2008, but it's still depressing.

It's here.

It looks like Apple removed any way to turn off IPv6. I've only been poking around the settings for a few minutes, but I don't see a way to disable it. Not sure if that's good or bad.

Apple had more to say about IPv6 support in iOS (that's still weird to type) at their WWDC 2010 conference. The Core Networking talk had an update on IPv6; Video (HD) and Slides (PDF) are available. They encouraged developers to make their apps IPv6-clean. I wonder if Apple will start rejecting IPv4-only apps from their App Store?

They claim to support stateless DHCPv6, but I haven't yet tested this. When I get some more time, I'll test it in an IPv6-only network.

Source: http://www.personal.psu.edu/dvm105/blogs/ipv6/2010/06/ipv6-on-iphone.html

Our friends over at linux.com have published their thrd article in the Weekend Project series. This Weekend Project is all about IPv6 and how to get started with it.

With information and tips about setting up IPv6 connectivity at your lan.  So check it out!

http://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/308738-weekend-project-transition-to-ipv6

Thinkbroadband called 17 uk broadband service providers a few weeks ago to ask if they supported IPv6 and we were quite surprised by the results to this simple question "Do you support IPv6?"

"Is that a TV channel?"

"I know quite a bit about computers but I've never heard that before."

Read the full article here

Yesterday IANA announced that they allocated 31/8 and 176/8 to RIPE NCC. LACNIC and APNIC will most likely allocate two blocks each soon. It looks like we only are going to have 9 usable block after this summer.

The total allocation rate from the RIR’s to its members has been very high lately, around 1.3-1.4 /8 block per month. All regional registrars except for ARIN that serves North America have seen an unusual high allocation rate. Even AfriNIC have currently a higher burn rate than ARIN. A recent allocation of 2 million addresses to Agence Tunisienne Internet in Tunisia contributed to AfriNIC’s high burn rate. (see the dashbord for a summarized view over burn rates, http://www.ipv4depletion.com/old.html)

9 blocks and 1.4 blocks per month in burn rate. You don’t have to have a master degree in mathematics to realize that it is time for IPv6.