An IPv6 Primer presentation prepared for CaribNOG 9, held in Saint Lucia on April 2015.

1. An IPv6 Primer
@CaribNOG9
Carlos M. Martinez
carlos @ lacnic.net
@carlosm3011

2. A bit of background…
• What is LACNIC ?
– LACNIC is the Latin American and Caribbean
Internet Address Registry
• Where does the NIC come from ? A nice bit of Internet
history… you can ask Mark about InterNIC
• What is ICANN ?
• About the IPv6 Roadshow
– Ask Alex and Albert !

3. Many of you have…
• … heard all this before!
• We are very interested in your feedback
– Are you deploying IPv6 ?
– If so, what made you take the plunge ? What
issues are you finding along the way ?
– If not, what is keeping you from doing it ? How
can we help you ?
• Your experiences are valuable to others!

4. Cirtcuit-based Networking

5. Packet Networking

6. What is an IP address?
• Numbers necessary for identifying origin
and destination endpoints of information
flows
– “airport codes” of IP packets
• They MUST be unique

7. IPv4
• There are 4.294.967.296 IPv4 addresses (not all
of them can be used)
• Looks like a lot, right?
• But... World population currently stands at just
over 7 billion people
• Mobile penetration 87%, Internet penetration
34%
• We all normally use more than one IP address
• They don't seem that many now!

8. Internet Devices and Users
growth

9. IPv4 Exhaustion
• February 2011, IANA Pool is exhausted (Global
pool)
• April 2011, APNIC Pool is exhausted (Asia
Pacific)
• October 2012, RIPE-NCC pool is exhausted
(Europe and Middle East)
• ARIN a year to exhaust their pools
• LACNIC less than a year to reach exhaustion
allocations policies

10. LACNIC Free IPv4 Pool

11. IPv4 exhaustion consecuences
• IPv4 address market (E.g. Microsoft buying
Nortel's legacy IP address space)
• Obtaining more IPv4 will only get more
expensive from now on
• Every day it would be more expensive to use
IPv4.
– In the transfers market the price of each address
varies from 10-25 USD per IP address.
– The annual cost to operate IPv4 in survival mode
(NAT) would be around 40 USD per user

12. Possible solutions
•Network Address Translation (NAT)
– Different variations on NAT (CGN, LSN,
NAT444, etc.)
– Basically different name for the same thing
•Buying IPv4 in the transfer market
–Really?
•IPv6

13. Network Address Translation (NAT)
• Allows sharing a single public IP address among
several devices
• Does not scale.
• Probably more expensive

14. (Some) Issues with NAT
• Users will have less control of what they can
and cannot do with their broadband
connection
– Port forwarding cannot be managed by the CPE
alone, needs ‘collaboration’ from the ISP
• CGN boxes can be shared across country
boundaries, making IP-based geolocation and
rights management even more of a mess

15. So, What is IPv6?
• The long term solution to the IPv4
exhaustion issue
• It's the new version of the IP protocol
– The one we currently use the most is IPv4
• 128 bit address field
• There are about 2128 = 3.4 x 1038 unique IPv6
addresses (not all of them can be used)
• That is… well… *a lot*

16. How Much IPv6 Is There?
• 3.4 x 1038 IP addresses
• 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,4
31,768,211,456 IP addresses!!
• Some say that there are enough IPv6
addresses for each one of the “Sahara's
desert grains of sand”.

17. IPv6 Goodness
• 128 bit address field
• Streamlined design
– Many support protocols like ARP and DHCP now
are folded into a single stack, ICMP6

18. Awesome!
• Then where is the problem ?

19. But...
• IPv4-only devices can't “talk” with IPv6-only
devices.
- A translator is needed (additional equipment,
with additional cost, etc.)
- This translator device also breaks the
communication model.

20. Wire Incompatibility
• This wire incompatibility raises a whole lot of
issues
– Equipment and software support for dual stack
networks
– Human resource training
– Enterprise systems support
• ISP billing and other systems

21. Dual Stack
• The best solution
• Dual-stack devices can
communicate with
other dual-stack
devices and with IPv4-
only and IPv6-only
devices
• Both devices use public
IPv4

22. Dual Stack
• Some organizations may still have IPv4 stocks to make
this approach viable
• For others, the situation is somewhat more
complicated
Source: http://opendata.labs.lacnic.net/

23. Dual Stack w/o Public IPv4
• If an ISP no longer has enough IPv4 for all its
customers, it still needs to provide IPv4 service
• The answer lies mostly in employing IPv4 NAT
(CGN) while still providing native IPv6
• Traffic now has a translated-IPv4 or a native-IPv6
path to choose from
– IPv6 will be preferred if it’s available
– Traffic through the CGN box will tend to go down over
time

24. IPv6, where are we?
• All modern operative systems support it:
Window 7-8, Linux, OS-X, Android, iOS,
Windows Mobile
• Most Network devices support it: Routers,
switches, Wireless APs, Firewalls
• Most transit providers support it
• 4G (LTE) support it, even requires it in some
architectures

25. Per-Country IPv6 Adoption
Some country stats
(Source: Google IPv6 Stats)
• Perú ~ 14%
• Ecuador ~ 5%
• Bolivia ~ 2%
• Brazil ~ 1.5%

26. IPv6 Prefix Visibility
• IPv6 prefix visibility on the GRT

27. Challenges
• Global IPv6 Traffic is now over 6% globally and
growing exponentially
– Caribbean IPv6 traffic less than 0.1%, way below
global average
• Mobile IPv6
• Broadband IPv6

28. LACNIC, what are we doing?
• Global allocation policies have delivered LACNIC
some more IPv4, buying some time
• We have trained more than 7,000 along Latin
America and the Caribbean
• Portal IPv6
– http://www.portalipv6.lacnic.net
• We have push IPv6 adoption with ISPs, ICPs,
Government, Academia
• IPv6 available in our networks and services

29. THANKS !