[rpd] Opposing the last call made on the review policy

[Andrew Alston]

You know,

I keep hearing this people getting involved in IPv6 on the continent argument.

I’ve also heard multiple times this claim that ISP’s are stockpiling IPv4.

So let address the latter before I address the former – with one simple question – where is the evidence.  It is an unfounded claim backed by no substantive evidence designed to fear monger to push a policy that  has no consensus and is not in the interests of the continent.  It is a tactic that has been used the world over by dodgy politicians to promote their interests – throw a claim that has no substantive evidence to back it up, and then repeat it often enough so that people start to accept their words as the evidence.  So – if this so called stockpiling is happening – show me the evidence – not I saw it in this presentation – actual empirical evidence – what are the numbers and who are these people who are stockpiling.

Now let me talk about IPv6 – something I happen to know a fair bit about – particularly in terms of ISP deployments.  Let us be completely honest, IPv6 is necessary – and we all have to get there – it’s not an option – v4 simply doesn’t scale to global needs.  But – instead of these meaningless platitudes about how everyone should go to IPv6 – how about we start openly and honestly talking about the challenges with IPv6 and how we address them – so that we can promote its deployment through proper understanding – and instead of everyone going “lets all move to ipv6” – let’s start finding solutions to some of the things that STOP people moving to IPv6.


  1.  Lack of legacy support in a fair ton of hardware – how do we deal with it
  2.  Vastly inconsistent support for transition mechanisms and chronically bad support for most of these transition mechanisms in CPE’s
  3.  The complete *mess* that MPLS support as concerns IPv6 (to this day you cannot do vpnv6 without a v4 underlay, martini is entirely bound to LDP and LDPv6 support is near non-existent, and I’ve yet to see Kompella working entirely without v4 in some form either)
  4.  The security challenges around IPv6 and the bad implementations that create issues here – issues which over the years we have learnt to deal with in IPv4 – Happy to expound on these off list – and no – they have nothing to do with NAT or the lack thereof – because NAT as a security mechanism was the biggest lie ever sold to an industry.

For years I have been an IPv6 advocate – and I still am – and I’ve actively deployed and run IPv6 in production supplying it to the end user, with multiple percentage point changes in country IPv6 penetration statistics as a result, but I am fast realizing that if we want IPv6 to grow and thrive – it’s time we started being a little more open and honest about the challenges and problems with it – instead of sprouting off that everyone should just move to it.   Let’s acknowledge that IPv6 is critical, we have no option, but it is also deeply flawed, has major problems, and until start dealing with those – we will see deployment continue to stutter

Andrew




From: Eucharia Maryann <eucharianene at gmail.com>
Date: Saturday, 1 December 2018 at 03:45
To: "RPD at afrinic.net" <RPD at afrinic.net>
Subject: [rpd] Opposing the last call made on the review policy

Again, I think in my own opinion that we should carefully look into this review policy before accepting it, and we should not be bias by trying to favour one person and put all whole lot of personal at risk so that we will not regret the action later. We should weigh the advantage and disadvantage of this policy. And if I could remember vividly from the presentation given at the conference by one the presenter who showed us the statistics level of Africa usage of the IPv6 which my own country is not even among the first top ten, we were all encouraged to start using the IPv6, Now have we ever thought of the reason why some ISP stockpile this IPv4? I guess no, we are all having the same mindset that they are stockpiling it for business purpose but I also know there are other reason why some ISP stockpile like using it to integrate IPv6 because we actually need the IPv4 to integrate the IPv6 so that it can become available and very common to Africans who is really behind in terms of the use of IPv6 which at the same time is going towards our goal in AFRINIC of getting some many people in africa involved in the use of IPv6.
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