Fw: [afripv6-discuss] IPv6 - The current status in the tertiaryeducation sector in South Africa

Andrew Alston aalston at its.uct.ac.za
Thu Jul 14 13:19:14 SAST 2005


(Sorry if this goes to the list twice, I accidently sent it last time from 
an unsubscribed list)

Hi Jordi,

Tenet currently uses telkom as a service provider.  To my knowledge (and Im
open to correction here), Telkom has been looking at v6 for a while now,
however they are at this point not ready to roll out native v6 on their
 network.  When this will happen Im not sure.

 As a result, we needed transit, to this end I approached both Occaid and
 RealRoute international, who kindly agreed to give us v6 transit as an
 educational institution.  (The realroute transit is temprorary until such
 time our other means of transit via another source goes live). (Many thanks
 to both Occaid and RealRoute for this btw).

 These tunnels run to endpoints in europe with the v4 tunnel backend going
 over Telkom current infrastructure, with what is actually incredibly low
 latency (about 153ms on the faster of the 2, which is only about 2ms higher
 than the latency over v4  to the european based v4 router we use)

 As a result, the v6 connectivity for Tenet at the moment is actually very
 very efficient (and in the case of US connected v6 hosts, like
 ftp.freebsd.org, the connectivity over the v6 tunnels via our transits is
 actually BETTER than going native v4 via our upstream to the states.  (With
 about 400% increase in transfer speeds over FTP when using v6 versus the 
v4,
 purely because the route it takes via v6 is better than the upstream v4
 route)

 As a result of this, while obviously this is up for much discussion and 
this
 view point could drastically change, and this is merely my own personal
 viewpoint, even if our upstream providers did go native v6, while obviously
 we would like to utilize that, we may well decide to also keep our Occaid
 transit tunnel in place as a backup, and also as a primary route in some
 cases because of how efficient it has proved to be.

 By the way, as a side note, Tenet opted to go for a FreeBSD routing 
solution
 for v6 for now, and while this could change in the future as we move
 forward, I just wanted to stress to those looking at v6, that you do NOT
 need to invest large amounts of money in new routers, IOS upgrades on your
 routers etc in order to do roll out v6 routing.  Using FreeBSD and doing 
bgp
 announcements from FreeBSD based platforms works like a dream, and if 
anyone
 wants more information on this, feel free to contact me.

 Anyway, thats just a bit more information.

 Thanks

 Andrew Alston
 Tenet IPv6 Consultant


> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "JORDI PALET MARTINEZ" <jordi.palet at consulintel.es>
> To: "IPv6 in Africa" <afripv6-discuss at afrinic.net>
> Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 9:37 AM
> Subject: Re: [afripv6-discuss] IPv6 - The current status in the 
> tertiaryeducation sector in South Africa
>
>
>> Hi Andrew,
>>
>> Once more I want to offer my help to enable both native and tunneled IPv6 
>> in
>> the region.
>>
>> Regarding this specific case, in order to move on, the first question 
>> will
>> be to make sure if there is any way to get a native service (or a 
>> tunneled
>> one in the worst case) with your own upstream providers. If you want to
>> provide me the information about who are the upstream providers 
>> (off-line),
>> I will be able, most probably, to help on that.
>>
>> I will be happy also to attend that workshop if that could help, just let 
>> me
>> know the details.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Jordi
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> De: Andrew Alston <aalston at its.uct.ac.za>
>>> Responder a: IPv6 in Africa <afripv6-discuss at afrinic.net>
>>> Fecha: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 19:25:21 +0200
>>> Para: <afripv6-discuss at afrinic.net>
>>> Asunto: [afripv6-discuss] IPv6 - The current status in the tertiary 
>>> education
>>> sector in South Africa
>>>
>>> Hi All,
>>>
>>> I thought for interests sake I'd share with the list the current status
>>> of IPv6 from the Tenet point of view (What we have, what we currently
>>> are doing etc).
>>>
>>> Tenet owns its own IPv6 Block, which obviously needed to be announced,
>>> and at the same time customers (the tertiary education units), needed to
>>> be able to start using this.  Currently there are no ISP's that I know
>>> of in South Africa doing native IPv6 internationally (if Im wrong here,
>>> someone please correct me).
>>>
>>> So after some negotiations we dropped tunnels to 2 points into Europe
>>> and announced our 2001:548::/32 block via AS 6149.
>>>
>>> Tenet now offers any of its customers an IPv6 tunnel end point should
>>> they so wish.  Obviously said customers would need to apply for IPv6
>>> space from Tenet first. (Tenet is currently an LIR for IPv6 space in the
>>> academic environment).  Currently there are a number of v6 blocks
>>> allocated to institutions, with 2 institutions with active tunnels and
>>> live utilization of their v6 blocks.
>>>
>>> At the moment there is a debate over the provision of IPv6 space to
>>> tertiary education units with regards to the size of the V6 blocks.  I
>>> discussed this matter in Barcelona at the IPv6 conference with some of
>>> the other NREN's and there seemed to be some fairly mixed opinions, but
>>> a lot of the NREN's were allocating /48s per facuilty, rather than per
>>> institution, which typically would mean the allocation of /44s, or
>>> perhaps /43s to the average university in South Africa.
>>>
>>> At current institutions are allocated /48s, but the starting points of
>>> the blocks are spaced in such a way that should the eventual decision to
>>> be taken to allocate on a /44 basis rather, this could be done without
>>> renumbering existing people.
>>>
>>> I have also attempted to contact various ISP's in South Africa who I
>>> have heard either have, or are planning some form of V6 implementation
>>> to discuss peering arrangements with Tenet, unfortunatly so far this has
>>> not yielded huge success, but I think as IPv6 rollout in South Africa
>>> grows, this will become easier. (If there are any ISP's in South Africa
>>> that are currently utilizing IPv6 that are interested in talking
>>> peering, please feel free to mail me off list).
>>>
>>> So, with all that being said, where to from here.
>>>
>>> I think to start with, we need to encourage the use of v6 in the
>>> institutions.  To this end there is a v6 workshop planned for the
>>> tertiary education units in September which will kindly be presented by
>>> 6diss.  Hopefully this will produce positive reaction and encourage the
>>> rollout.
>>>
>>> Anyway, thats where we currently sit with regards to v6.
>>>
>>> Many Thanks
>>> Andrew Alston
>>> Tenet - IPv6 Consultant
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> afripv6-discuss at afrinic.net
>>> http://lists.afrinic.net/mailman/listinfo.cgi/afripv6-discuss
>>
>>
>>
>>
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