[afripv6-discuss] Re: afripv6-discuss Digest, Vol 47, Issue 3

[Paul Ikanza]

You are right, its integration and not migration-I guess the emphasis is on depletion and having to accommodate IPv6 regardless and therefore, for anyone planning long term, its only prudent that this change is embraced other than to keep hoping that there is still some time.
Paul
S e n t   f r o m   m y   MTN B l a c k B e r r y ®   s m a r t p h o n e

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Tinka <mtinka at globaltransit.net>
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2010 23:05:38 
To: <afripv6-discuss at afrinic.net>; <pikanza at gmail.com>
Reply-To: mtinka at globaltransit.net
Cc: hisham ahmed. ibrahim<ahisham at mcit.gov.eg>
Subject: Re: [afripv6-discuss] Re: afripv6-discuss Digest, Vol 47, Issue 3

On Sunday 20 June 2010 10:12:14 pm Paul Ikanza wrote:

> Also,
> The reason, I think its overdue is that, realistically,
>  we shall have to migrate to IPv6 in the very short term.

You can probably find this severely repeated if you Google 
hard enough, but it's not so much a "migration" as it is an 
"integration".

v4 isn't going anywhere (for a while). v6 will live side-by-
side with v4, most likely, for a very, very long time to 
come.

>  By global estimates, IPv4 address deplition shall be
>  effective with 18 months...

Depletion will occur "toward" the LIR's, i.e., operators 
won't be able to receive any new allocations from the 
registries. However, these operators may still have some 
free v4 space to hand out to new Internet users for, 
perhaps, several months (depends on the rate of user demand 
- maybe, as a result of no more v4 space among some 
competing operators -, operator size, e.t.c.).

>  or so afterwhich we shall have
>  quite afew service disruptions if there are no proper
>  guidelines in place for equipment vendors for example so
>  we actually need to move quickly on this.

Guidelines to vendors come from us, the customers. We need 
to place the socio-economic pressure on our vendors to 
provide support for v6 in everything that we're currently 
doing with v4.

The IETF and other such standards bodies concerned with IP-
related protocols will continue to develop guidelines on how 
features should implement v6 (and how features should be 
implemented, period). However, as it is today, there are a 
number of v6-related RFC's and/or drafts that the vendors 
have not yet implemented, not least of which are for 
protocols already well-supported in v4. The pressure for 
them to do so has to come from us, the operators/users.

Cheers,

Mark.