[rpd] Statistics on IPV4 allocation in Africa as of 2016

Tue Aug 23 07:11:57 UTC 2016

Thanks Tamon,This buttresses my earlier position that the way forward is not to wait until we have all the answers but to be willing to learn as we go along. Just because there are no deadlines on v6 adoption worldwide does not mean that the African community must continue to play safe while the rest of the world is moving forward.AFRINIC is already doing a great job through capacity building in empowering the community and getting them to begin so we don't really have much excuses.    

    On Monday, August 22, 2016 11:51 PM, Mukom Akong T. <tamon at afrinic.net> wrote:

On 22 Aug 2016, at 11:28 AM, Andrew Alston <Andrew.Alston at liquidtelecom.com> wrote:
For far too long I have heard V6 touted as some utopia, and I am as guilty as everyone else of this, saying that rolling it out isn’t a problem etc.

that often tends to be a view from implementations on the core network, seldom to users or to services 

  The reality is, people need to know what they are going into, they need to understand the challenges, the pitfalls, and the advantages.  If you give them an unrealistic picture of what is involved, the moment they hit a challenge they weren’t expecting, they will shy away and convincing them to try again won’t happen.

“Keep your vision, everything else should be negotiable” - #DontRecallWhoSaidThis (hey … it could be me 😀)
Often, “what they are going into” is not knowable until they start DOING some implementation/testing after a clear problem statement (e.g. get out subscribers on IPv6 as measured by % of their Internet traffic that is IPv6)  Others have gone through this in admittedly different circumstances and have found it mostly without major issues.
If your experience tells anything, it is the importance of the following flow 
a) FOCUS - what are you trying to accomplish?b) PLAN - how will you get there?c) DO/IMPLEMENT - what you thought will lead you thered) STUDY/TEST - did what your actions actually get you there?e) ADAPT your plan based upon reality (this means go back to PLAN → DO → STUDY → ADAPT until you achieve the goal or after some iterations realise the goal is unattainable. 
the last 4 steps are the well-known Scientific Method, it’s the part that most people that whine about reality/practice differing from theory/goal just don’t get. Testing & Adapting is what brings practice in line with the plan as you’ve  just demonstrated.

  And talking about v4 fallback is important – because that alone can cause some… interesting challenges.  Let me give you an example – I had a situation last week where I was struggling to figure out, why the v6 traffic levels were so low.  I looked and I looked, and everything *seemed* to be ok – so eventually, I turned off IPv4 ENTIRELY on my test machine.  Suddenly I discovered that all was not so well… what had been happening was that the system was using happy eyeballs and spotting breakage and instantly doing IPv4 fallback.  Once I disabled v4 entirely, I could clearly see the issue, and I logged tickets with the relevant content provider to get these issues fixed.  The initial reaction from that content provider was interesting – they disabled my ability to get quad-a records rather than fix the problem.  At that point thanks to a very kind individual who contacted me after I put some posts on certain lists, and a further escalation, they actually resolved the issue and I’m back to getting quad-a records and v6 traffic. 

Naming and shaming as well as peer-pressure on public lists like this sometimes is quite effective.

  Simply put, this is not an easy path we are on, it’s a path that has to be taken and we have no choice but to go down it, but let us start talking openly about just how difficult that path can be, so that we’re prepared to actually face the challenges.  Let us not start saying that people should simply “not concentrate on v4”, because that is not realistic.  In all we do, we have to be realistic and continue to put the customers first – and so as we move to v6, we have to keep THAT in mind as well.  

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