- IPv6 news and information

BurstNET Technologies, Inc.™, a leading provider of budget hosting services, today announced IPv6 addressing service available end-to-end on its entire product line: including Dedicated Servers, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), & Co-Location.

Complete info at GreatResponder.

I first heard about the idea of tainted /8 blocks from Tony Hain from Cisco a few years ago (thanks for sharing your ideas). The fear was that some IPv4 addresses were unusable because some equipment vendors, documents and networks would use addresses from those blocks “illegally”.

One of the most tainted block could be the 1/8 block (Come on, who hasn’t used 1.1.1.1 or 1.2.3.4 in an example in documentation or as an IPv4 for a quick hack). One excellent description of the problem and a study on how tainted those blocks could be can be found in Mark Blachets blog.

Thankfully the problem does not appear to be as severe as initially anticipated. APNIC got the 1/8 block allocated from IANA in January 2010 and started to delegated large chunks of the block in May of 2010 as described here

There are reports about some bogus traffic to a few of the addresses within the 1/8 block. What has happened is that APNIC reserved and trashed a few /24 from the 1/8 block.. Those /24 will probably never be used on the Internet. These blocks in question are 1.0.0.0/24, 1.1.1.0/24, 1.4.0.0/24, 1.10.10.0/24, 1.50.8.0/24 that totaling about 1000 addresses. A whois lookup points them to researchers at APNIC. Most of the rest of the block is now allocated to various APNIC members.

RIPE allocated the 2/8 block from IANA in September 2009. Most of the addresses are used up, for example 2.2.2.2 is delegated to France Telecom. There are no signs of small delegations that are thrown away because of dirtyness in the 2/8 block.

The conclusion that can be drawn is that we do not have to be overly concerned about tainted IPv4 addresses. The problem appears to only affect very specific subnets and IPv4 addresses and not whole /8. I would assume that the same will be seen in other potentially tainted blocks such as 100/8.

Source:  http://www.ipv4depletion.com

China Telecom has launched pilot projects for Internet Protocol v6 (IPv6) in four provinces, looking to better understand the Internet addressing protocol as it applies to varied industries, such as crop monitoring in greenhouses and property management networks.

Complete info at InformationWeek.

John Ribeiro from IDG News reports: “India will start using IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) from March 2012, according to a new roadmap released by the Indian government. All telecom and ISPs will have to be IPv6-compliant by the end of next year and offer IPv6 services thereafter, the government said in a statement issued on Wednesday by the country’s Press Information Bureau.”

Read full story: PC World

RIPE Labs graph looks at IPv6 ripeness rate of all countries in the RIPE NCC service region as measured in July 2010. (Click to Enlarge)As the unallocated IPv4 address pool runs out, are Internet Service Providers (ISPs) actually deploying IPv6?

This graph, the first in a series from RIPE Labs, looks at the IPv6 “ripeness” of all ISPs registered as RIPE NCC members. We created a rating system that gives ISPs up to four “stars” for IPv6 services that they provide, based on the following criteria:

• The ISP has an IPv6 allocation

• The address prefix is actually routed on the Internet

• A route6 object is registered in the RIPE Database

• Reverse DNS has been set up>

The graph illustrates countries in the RIPE NCC service region (Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia) that have at least five ISPs; each one gets a rating ranging from zero stars to four stars. The graph indicates the level of IPv6 deployment in a specific country and in the region as a whole.

Some key findings show that:

• 27% of all ISPs in the RIPE NCC service region have at least one IPv6 allocation

• 8% have achieved four-star IPv6 ripeness

• Slovenia has the highest IPv6 deployment: 67% of all ISPs in Slovenia have at least one star and nearly 25% have four stars!

Slovenia is doing exceptionally well, undoubtedly due to a very active and persuasive IPv6 community. Of course, in a relative scoring system like this, smaller countries have a slight advantage. However, it’s worth noting that the runners-up include larger economies such as Portugal, the Netherlands and Germany.

The bad news is that nearly 73% of all ISPs have not even requested IPv6 space yet (indicated by the white bars on the graph). It’s surprising that so many ISPs have yet to feel the urgency to deliver their services on IPv6 to enable their business to grow, especially when only a little more than 4% of IPv4 address space remains.

The deployment rate of IPv6 is certainly lagging far behind what technical experts consider desirable, but there is clearly a positive trend. We will bring you more hard numbers on IPv6 deployment in this series.

What next?

We are considering extending our rating with a fifth star based on reachability over IPv6. We have several ideas, but we are curious to hear from you—what do you think is a good way to measure IPv6 reachability?

Read more about the methodology to collate this data on the RIPE Labs site.

Written by Daniel Karrenberg, Chief Scientist at the RIPE NCC

ZyXEL Communications, the world’s leading broadband access solutions provider, today announced that its VDSL CPE/IAD products have been certified for IPv6 Ready Logo Phase II by the IPv6 Forum.
Complete info at EarthTimes, ChannelTimes and SMR.