On 6/25/16 6:38 PM, S Moonesamy wrote:
> Hi Logan,
>
> I read the article in "Le Mauricien" about IPv4 addresses. The
> article does not mention your employer. :-) There was a discussion
> [1] about IPv4 addresses recently.
Hi SM,
First, thank you for mentioning the article in "Le Mauricien" about IPv4
addresses, as I believe that it affects Internet Users in Mauritius.
Currently, my employer is AFRINIC Ltd. The article was a modified
version of what I wrote on my personal blog about my personal views on
the Mauritius National Innovation Framework.
>
> You mentioned that: "In order for Mauritius to capture the IOT market,
> we need a solid plan to grow our IPv4 resource usage to make room for
> those millions of IOT devices". I watched people giving presentations
> about the Internet of Things locally. I was surprised that nobody
> mentioned that there isn't that many IPv4 addresses available.
>
(Replying In my personal capacity to the rest of the mail)
I agree with you here that nobody mentioned the shrinking IPv4 address
pool in Africa during the National Innovation Framework. It was also
surprising to me as well.
IPv4 addresses are end-points on the internet to allow a device to talk
to each other. Needless to say, with a shrinking IPv4 address pool in
Mauritius, we will not be able to grow our Internet, and it is unclear
what the strategy for IP resource usage for the coming years is, in
terms of National strategy. The minister mentioned that there are more
smartphones sold in Mauritius that the population of Mauritius itself.
This suggests that there is still a growing need for IP connectivity,
despite the small size of the island.
IPv4 and IPv6 are the underlying infrastructure for Internet of Things,
that will support for growth of Internet of Things, and the digital
economy of our island.
> Who is going to work on the plan? Will it be local companies or
> universities which are interested in the Internet of Things, or will
> it be the Ministry of Technology, Communication and Innovation?
>
I believe that everybody needs to be involved in any plan that can be
executed successfully.
1) Government
The ministry needs to encourage ISPs to grow their IPv4 resource space
in the short term with respect to their expected growth in the coming
years. We should be realistic as a lot of content on the Internet is
still accessible over IPv4 only. We will need IPv4, even after a
successful migration to IPv6.
2) Businesses
I've seen some interesting companies building Internet of Things in
Mauritius, that they sell either locally or Internationally. In the US,
the penetration of IPv6 is around 20%, and in some EU countries it's up
to 42% in the case of Belgium. In France it's up to 10% and in UK around
12%.
(Figures from here:
https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption&tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption)
If those IOT companies target the EU/US market, they need to have
products that have been tested on IPv6, before shipping them to those
countries, or there might be massive product recall. It's important to
understand the trend that the growth of IPv6 in EU/US is EXPONENTIAL,
not linear.
I don't think that local iot businesses would like reviews/product
recalls like NEST:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY
3) End-users
How many end-users are buying products that are linked to the Internet
nowadays ? Many. One might argue that cramming those devices behind a
single public IPv4 address is an acceptable solution. However, will
this still be the case as other parts of the world are taking advantage
of Ipv6 for better user experience ? With IPv6, One could get roughly
1,208,907,372,870,555,465,154,560 IPv6 address from a reasonable ISP.
IPv6 has more addresses than IPv4, and an ISP could easily give out /48
as public static IPv6 addresses. Any device using a public IPv6 address
would be directly connected to the internet and if you are doing a voip
call, the quality would be better. You want your smart bulb to be easily
accessible over Ipv6 with a static IP to avoid small downtime that be
critical.
4) Content providers
Going through the list of TOP 10 content providers for Mauritius from Alexa:
list obtained from (
http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/MU), and
some quick tests using ping:
1- youtube - IPv6 enabled.
2- facebook.com - IPv6 enabled (still some issues with chat window)
3- google.mu - IPv6 enabled.
4- google.com - IPv6 enabled.
5- lexpress.mu - NO IPv6 connectivity. (Simple test : ping6
www.lexpress.mu, result -> unknown host)
6-yahoo.com - IPv6 enabled.
7-bing.com - NO IPv6 connectivity (ping6 www.bing.com -> result -
unknown host)
8-topfmradio.com - NO IPv6 connectivity (ping6 topfmradio.com -> result
unknown host)
9-wikipedia.com - IPv6 enabled.
10-live.com - NO IPv6 connectivity (ping6 live.com -> result unknown host)
I would argue that right now, those content providers who HAVE NO IPv6
connectivity are experiencing a degraded user experience world-wide as
12% of the world can reach google through IPv6. This means that in order
to access those sites from regions that use IPv6 (due to Ipv4
depletion), there has to be a translator mechanism to allow those
Ipv6-only end-users to access those websites that are IPv4-only. A
translator mechanism would incur additionally latency, and therefore
affect the user experience. Negative user experience means losing
revenue for content providers.
This trend will get worse as Ipv6 usage world-wide is growing
exponentially.
5) ISP
ISPs need to be able to provide both IPv4 and IPv6, as realistically, A
lot of content is still accessible over Iv4 only. However, with the Ipv4
depletion, we will reach a point where we will only be able to give Ipv6
addresses, and we need to make sure that the IPv6 network that the ISP
provides is as good as it's IPv4 network.
Let me explain this point:
If an ISP offers IPv6, and the customers complain that Google is "slow"
with IPv6. It might be an issue with the ISP not being able to build a
high quality IPv6 network.
If the ISPs don't offer a good Ipv6 connectivity to their customers,
they might simply turn off IPv6 due to the increase in customer
complaints. Therefore, it's important for ISPs to plan a good rollout of
IPv6, that offer either same or better user experience with their IPv4.
Of course, with shrinking Ipv4 addresses, it will be harder for ISPs to
cope with the demand for Internet, and they need to plan and deploy Ipv6
soon.
> Regards,
> S. Moonesamy
>
> 1. https://lists.afrinic.net/pipermail/rpd/2016/005563.html
>
Received on Sun Jun 26 2016 - 05:04:33 PST