Local Loop

A reader contacted me asking more details about the IPv6 hit I received from Web Africa on World IPv6 Day, and that prompted me to take a closer look.

Actually that request, as well as the one that I thought was from MWEB, were both from hosts on their networks connecting via tunnels (6to4 for WA, and Teredo for MWEB). Even worse, I suspect both tunnels terminated on overseas gateways.

So, for the second time this week, I’m eating my IPv6 words. MWEB and Web Africa, I un-congratulate you.

Because both tunnel mechanisms embed the source IPv4 address in a IPv6 address, whois(1) is able to extract the real endpoint address and do a look-up on that. It actually reports that it has done this conversion, but I wasn’t reading the output carefully enough. I’ll try making up for the error with interesting (and hopefully correct) commenatry about the state of IPv6 in our nation.

Although Localloop didn’t see evidence on Wednesday of native IPv6 turn-up in South Africa, I believe there is hope for this to change in the near future:

About 54 South African networks have IPv6 prefixes allocated to them, but only 24 of those prefixes are (currently) correctly routed on the IPv6 internet. Many of them have never been routed on the Internet. For more detail check out this excellent resource:

http://www.sixxs.net/tools/grh/dfp/all/?country=za

Among those that are working, you’ll find big players like Telkom SA and Internet Solutions, both of which I’m sure would sell you expensive “corporate” IPv6-enabled access over leased lines. Most interestingly however:

• Web Africa’s block has never been announced according to GRH, so I was very wrong about them rolling out IPv6.
• MWEB, on the other hand, is announcing an enormous block, a /26. This is twice as big as IS’ block, and 64 times (6 bits) bigger than most other blocks (Telkom’s or TENET’s for example), yet their users are not hitting my site from this prefix.

To be fair, local ADSL ISPs like MWEB and Web Africa have a good excuse for not yet providing native IPv6 to their users: as far as I know, it is impossible. The cause of this problem has to do with the routing set up (“IP Connect”) that Telkom SA uses to re-sell access to their ADSL cloud.

The good news is that Telkom has a new system in the pipeline called “IP Stream” that would work around this limitation by providing bit-stream connections between ADSL users and their ISPs. I believe some providers are getting ready to take advantage of IP Stream to roll out IPv6 to users en masse. If I’m right, it would explain how MWEB succeeded in motivating for a /26 to AfriNIC.

With some luck, next year’s World IPv6 Day will see Localloop getting some (real) native IPv6 hits from local consumer ISPs.