IPv6 News

Nixu NameSurfer 7.2 – The latest addition to the Nixu DDI product family. (Click to Enlarge)Nixu Software is pleased to announce the release of the latest version of its flagship IP Address Management (IPAM) solution, the NameSurfer Suite 7.2 series. The latest addition to the Nixu DDI product family introduces a new Search & Modify tool geared for rich user experience, and an open SOAP API that facilitates seamless integration with orchestration systems used in multivendor clouding environments.

Based on cutting-edge Dojo programming, the new Search & Modify tool included in Nixu NameSurfer Suite allows network administrators to dynamically search across the entire DDI platform, build filters and perform various operations and bulk changes on the search results. The set of interactive tools available in the global toolset dramatically simplify the day-to-day management of the DDI platform translating to improved efficiency and greater OPEX.

“Most companies in the DDI space are still geared towards increasing the complexity of their solutions, making them cumbersome and inefficient to run” said Ville Kummu, Director of Technical Operations at Nixu Software. “To counter this unfortunate trend, we have decided to jump the industry ship and now focus on effortless user experience.”

Find out more about Nixu NameSurfer Suite and download a free 30-day evaluation license from our website.

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When visiting a friend in the UK in my student days some decades ago, he asked me at one point in time if I had some coins to keep the electricity meter going. This was the first and last time I saw a coin activated electricity meter. In my mind, prepaid electricity now essentially belonged to a distant past when Scrooge like landlords would make sure renters did not disappear without paying their electricity bills.

On a recent business trip however, I realized that prepaid electricity has rather adapted well to the modern age with electronic readers and even prepaid cards, just like for telephony. In India, prepaid metering is in fact quite common as is also the case in a number of former British colonies including South Africa. Not only that, the popularity of prepaid electricity is growing as the Times of India reported recently, citing the city of Pune.

Smart grids are a hot topic everywhere including here in Canada where our ITAC Smart Grid Committee is quite active and participation proves interesting. International standards that govern smart meter data exchange are more advanced than widely assumed. A closer look at the PLC G3 spec for example, shows 6lowpan and compressed IPv6 on the network and transport layer. On the application level, we find the data exchange formats with electric meters defined by ANSI C12 in North America and IEC62056 in Europe.

This is not just talk. In a North American first, BC Hydro announced that they would deploy IPv6 smart grid architecture as an element of its Smart Metering Program and started to replace its 1.8 million electromechanical meters. They had looked at Smart Grids since 2005 but the 2010 the BC Clean Energy Act mandated smart meters and thereby provided the impetus needed. Canadian Big Telco ices the IPv6 puck and Big Hydro scores.

The e-age incarnation of the old electricity coin eater even finds renewed respect in the marketplace. A recent study by Pike Research forecasts a growing market with the number of prepaid meters growing from a current 20 million worldwide to 33.7 million by 2017. Another study in the US shows that consumers actually like prepaid and save more than 10% on their electricity bill. In an age where going green and browsing for the best deal are fashionable, the Pike Research forecast might even turn out to be conservative.

Nowadays, my long lost British friend might even be reloading his electricity counter by m-payment. He might shiver if his prepaid voice account ran out and his phone battery was about to die while the lights went dark and the heater turned silent on a damp and humid London winter night.

Written by Yves Poppe, Director, Business Development IP Strategy at Tata Communications

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The RIPE NCC is 20 years old and it now has over 8,000 members. In this article we are looking at the growth curve and the composition of the membership: what industry do RIPE NCC members come from today.

The RIPE NCC became the first Regional Internet Registry in September 1992 (six months after it was set up as the secretariat for the European operators community, RIPE). During the course of 1993, the distributed IP allocation system was established in which Local Internet Registries (LIRs) received blocks of IP addresses from the RIPE NCC which were then further assigned to their customers and others who wanted to connect to the Internet.

By the end of 1993, there were 83 LIRs registered as members of the RIPE NCC. Most of these LIRs were operated by academic networks and the first commercial ISPs that started around that time in some European countries.

Now, 20 years later, 8,000 members are registered with the RIPE NCC (March 2012). The RIPE NCC’s membership has been steadily growing since 1998 when it passed the 1,000-member milestone, followed by 3,000 in 2001 and 6,000 in 2008 (as you can see in the graph below).

It is interesting to note that despite the fact that IPv4 is becoming very scarce, we still see a large number of organisations join the RIPE NCC. In fact, in the first quarter of 2012, we saw the highest number of new membership applications ever. In 2011, we experienced the highest growth since the dot com bubble around the year 2000. Also, that the graph only shows the number of LIRs that were active at any point in time. It doesn’t show any of the members who closed in the meantime (if we counted every registry ever opened, we would be looking at a total of over 13,000).

In the graphic below, you can see which industry area our members are from. Note that this is a self-chosen category and it is possible to choose more than one category. Organisations that provide the following services are highest on the list: service hosting, collocation and broadband. But Telecom operators, dial-up service providers and transit providers also make up a big portion of the RIPE NCC membership. There are also quite a number of government institutions are members of the RIPE NCC.

It is also interesting that currently the same six countries account for 50% of the membership, 50% of the number of IPv4 allocations and 50% of the number of IPv6 allocations in the RIPE NCC service region. For more information, please refer to the background article on RIPE Labs: RIPE NCC Membership from 80 to 8,000

Written by Mirjam Kuehne

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Delegates from all parts of the world gathered in San Jose Costa Rica. The host country in Central America, Costa Rica (which means “Rich Coast”) has an interesting history having constitutionally abolished its army permanently in 1949.

It’s one of the greenest countries in the world thriving with a rich ecosystem that could not escape ICANN CEO ,Rod Beckstrom’s opening speech saying “Few places on earth can rival Costa Rica and its vast variety of plants, animals, and insects. Despite its relatively small size, it is home to almost 5% of the world’s species including more than a thousand species of butterflies alone”.

The meeting which hosted delegates from all over the world was also attended by our very own Director and founder of DCA, Ms. Sophia Bekele who had the opportunity to attend and participate in discussions. She was one of the delegates representing the African continent. This is the 43rd convention organized since the inception of ICANN.

Mr Rod beckstrom recognized and thanked AFRALO the main organizes of Dakar 42 meeting hosted in Senegal Africa terming it spectacular saying that Participation in the monthly AFRALO teleconferences has risen 30% since Dakar.

Her Excellency President, Laura Chinchilla who days before the ICANN 43 meeting declared meeting as a public interest event in Costa Rica, calling government agencies and the private sector alike to collaborate . She noted that the meeting was taking place at an important time in history where a new address regime IPv6 had been introduced and urged its adoption.

She recognized the rapid development of the web 2.0 and the concerns about the attempts to regulate internet saying in part “The legitimate concerns on the field of privacy, security, and protection of intellectual property should not become an excuse to justify trends seeking to exercise highly restrictive controls on cyberspace.”, the need of online protection and enforcement of digital trade act alternatives should rather focus on tracking and limiting payments to illegitimate Web sites without limiting the social transformation potential offered by Internet 2.0.

Other notable speeches included Dr Crocker, who recognized the rapid growth of internet since his days at ARPANET. He acknowledged the transparency that the web has become noting the RFC documents that have become publicly available. More than 25% of the global population has Internet access, and in some countries that connectivity reaches 100%. Therefore, Internet is a reality that cannot be ignored and that has enabled stakeholders to place more significance on it.

He singled out growth attributed to successful startups by individuals that have revolutionized the internet “And we fully expected there would be new services, new ideas, we also understood that it would be foolish for us to insist our views or our expectations would be the only way things would happen…”

He traces the www evolution exclaiming “the www was created by physicists in Switzerland, that eBay revolutionized auctions, Amazon: retail sales of books. Google: search, Skype and Twitter and Facebook would all come about from individual initiatives …” This shows the unlimited nature of online entrepreneurship that has made multibillionaires

The growth of Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO) is unstoppable and now boasts of 126 members — including 17 new members during the year 2011. The multistakeholder, though slow in its functions, is built by consensus, from the bottom up, and that gives voice to the millions whose future is tied to the Internet and must be guarded as on of the guardians of the internet fraternity.

Being the year of the new gTLD’s, the outgoing ICANN CEO mentioned that so far, 254 registered users have been registered in the on-line application system, since the application window opened in January, assured the delegates of the highly protected tamper proof application system. Mr. Crocker emphasized that even the ICANN staff were not privy of the information.

The formation of three big teams to aid in the ICANN operations during the application were lauded Accountability and Transparency Review Team, WHOIS review team and Security, Stability and Resiliency Team. The next milestone is the publication of the applied-for new gTLD strings in early May.

Dotconnectafrica indeed shares the values that have been thoughtfully emphasized by the honorable speakers in this conference, the issues that foster development and transparency of the internet space and like Mr. HARTMUT GLASER, LACNIC representative and Chief Executive Secretary of CGI.br ably put it, “I believe that Internet use should be steered by the principles of freedom of speech, individual privacy, and respect for human rights…” adding that “Internet governance must be transparent, multilateral, and democratic, with the participation of several segments of society preserving and fostering its collective creation nature.”

In the same vein, need for transparency and elimination of conflict of interests cannot be ignored within the governing systems and DCA seconds Mr. Beckstrom who indeed remarked: “We must seize the opportunity to embrace the transparency and good governance that this precious resource deserves. ICANN must be able to act for the public good while placing commercial and financial interest in the appropriate context.”

By and large the ICANN 43 meeting in Costa Rica was rated by the delegates as one of the most successful meetings presided by ICANN, many issues touching on internet security, child protection, Internet growth and largely the new upcoming gTLD’s were the main topics of deliberation during the entire conference.

DCA hopes that the discussions that transpired in the forums will go a long way to foster the future of internet and make it better for the benefit of all peoples of this world better called “netizens” .

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I opined about a year ago that DNS blacklists wouldn’t work for mail that runs over IPv6 rather than IPv4. The reason is that IPv6 has such a huge range of addresses that spammers can easily send every message from a unique IP address, which means that recipient systems will fire off a unique set of DNSBL queries for every message, which will swamp DNS caches, since they won’t be able to reuse cached results from previous queries like they can for IPv4 mail.

Now I’m much less sure this will be a problem, because it’s not clear that DNSBL results benefit from caches now.

Large and small mail systems access DNSBLs differently. Large systems make arrangements with the DNSBL operators to download their own copies of the DNSBLs they use via rsync or something similar. Then they glom all of the DNSBLs together and typically run copies of rbldnsd on the same local networks as the mail servers so for each incoming message, the mail server can send a local query to rbldnsd and get back one response with all of the DNSBL information relevant to the message. For these systems, a DNS cache provides no benefit because getting the answer from rbldnsd is just as fast if not faster than getting it from a cache. I don’t know whether they currently configure their systems not to use caches, but if they don’t, it would be technically straightforward. In a world with IPv6 DNSBLs, this would all work exactly the same way, download the DNSBL with rsync and serve it locally with rbldnsd.

Small systems send ordinary DNS queries to the main servers for each DNSBL they use, typically via a local DNS cache. As far as I can tell, caches don’t help these systems either, because there isn’t enough repeat traffic from the same IP to reuse cached results. It is surprisingly hard to find trace data to test out this theory, but it seems to be true of traffic on my small (100K connections/day) system, and on the few others I’ve been able to ask. (If you are willing to provide mail server connection traces of timestamps and IP addresses, so I can do more testing, please let me know. Or I can provide test scripts you can run on your own data and see how well your DNSBL queries cache.)

This suggests that DNSBL clients, which are usually mail servers, will be able to use DNSBLs largely the same way they do now, perhaps with modest cache partitioning tweaks to tell the caches not to bother caching DNSBL query results. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no problems with IPv6 DNSBLs. In the next message, I’ll look at problems facing DNSBL operators.

Written by John Levine, Author, Consultant & Speaker

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ICANN 43 in Costa Rica was in the heart of IPv6 implementation with everybody touching on how much it was needed as part of the internet ecosystem to fully utilize the ICANN expansion of the new gTLD namespace from 21 to the maximum number that will manage to get delegated at the beginning of 2013.

Since the announcement of IPv6 full launch in July 2011 there has been many activities to either fully adopt the technology or find means and ways to bridge the services to provide a translation mechanism between IPv4 and IPv6, however as per Hurricane Electric, an IPv6 authority who has over 11 years experience, it’s not impossible but a practical technology to implement

A presentation of Hurricane electric on the IPv6 developments over their 11 year history has put much information over how and why IPv6 needs to be implemented and accepted. A delve into the IPV6 session is very key in putting into focus how and when the full exploitation of the new inexhaustible technology can run. A quick view at the fact given by the Hurricane Electric presenter at the World IPv6 launch session gave the following helpful statistics:

The increase of the Autonomous system number owners has steadily rose to 12.1% within a three year period beginning 2010. The DNS glue records too are now at 266 out of a possible 313. The ccTLD country code count is now at 149 from a small count of 91 in 2010. Generally the number of certifications awarded for the IPv6 deployments too has seen a steady rise meaning many people are seeking to deploy within their systems therefore a certification was needful for the proper management.

The challenges that have been far received include the ccTLD registrars implementing the glue records which so far not many support. However it need not be an impatient process. The experience of the firms has been that by developing the existing systems e.g. upgrading the load balancers and additional training materials, organizations such as CIRA have implemented ways that has helped in adoption.

In a period of 550 days beginning 2010, the rise of 88% IPv6 prefixes annually and 80% rise of ASN’s — this indicates the desire to fully switch to the new system. Within the TLD system a check presents an 85% adoption by TLD operators with an 82.4% hit for the glue records installations to root. Glue records are a key component in the deployment of the IPv6 technology and the operators have to ensure within thick and thin to have this implemented within their systems.

With a promise by the largest owners of the social network services like Google and Facebook to act and make their services fully IPv6 compliant, it’s imperative that everybody who wants to fully utilize the services of an IPv6 technology has to adopt it to seamlessly operate their business system without need for inter-system translation technologies which sometimes have compatibility issues.

More trainings have to be in fact organized by governments who own a stake in the ccTLD business, as well as well established private sector firms. This means that a cross cutting relationship has to be established that will also involve the financial, educational, technology as well as the governmental bodies to bring a more structured system.

Having more experienced users of any new technology that includes IPv6 is not an option but a necessity now that the imminent demise of IPv4 is closer than ever imagined.

Written by Gideon Rop, Project Support Engineer-DotConnectAfrica

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In our last post on CircleID — Networks Announcing IPv6 – One Year Later — we showed encouraging growth in the number of IPv6-enabled networks.

But announcing an IPv6 prefix is only one of the first steps a network operator should take when deploying IPv6. For a full IPv6 deployment, IPv6 needs to be enabled on network infrastructure and made available to end users. One key piece of infrastructure for which we can measure IPv6 capabilities are DNS resolvers. These are typically (in around 80% of cases) located in the same network as the end users who are using them.

We’ve been tracking the IPv6 capabilities of the DNS resolvers that are used by visitors to www.ripe.net since early 2010. See Measuring IPv6 at Clients and Caching Resolvers for earlier results (March 2010). Two key metrics used here are the IPv6 preference of end users and the IPv6 capability of the DNS resolvers used by these end users. The IPv6 preference of end users measured here indicates the percentage of clients that connect over IPv6 to www.ripe.net, which is dual-stacked. The IPv6-capable resolvers measured here indicate the percentage of clients that use a DNS resolver that is capable of using IPv6 for DNS resolution. The intuition here is that network operators will first enable IPv6 on their caching DNS resolvers and in later steps of IPv6 deployment roll it out to end users.

Recently, we saw noticeable increases in the IPv6 capabilities of DNS resolvers, as indicated by the blue line in the image below.*

As you can see, over 25% of end users that visit www.ripe.net currently use a resolver that is IPv6-capable. This is far more then the 2-3% of end users that really use IPv6 to visit www.ripe.net (as indicated by the red line in Figure 1).

The gap between the IPv6 capabilities of end users and the resolvers they use is widening over time. I think this is indicative of a frequently mentioned problem with deploying IPv6 to end users: the lack of IPv6 capabilities in many (older) customer-premises equipment (CPE) and/or the economics of replacing old CPE. (see also the IPv6 CPE Survey on RIPE Labs). However, it does show operators extending the IPv6 capabilities of their networks, and why would they do that, other then to eventually provide this to their end-users?

The growth curves of both the IPv6-enabled networks and IPv6-enabled DNS resolvers show broad progress towards full IPv6 adoption. We’re getting there … slowly.

For more details, please refer to the background article on RIPE Labs: Growth in IPv6-Capable DNS Infrastructure.

* Note that the www.ripe.net audience is biased towards network operators. That means the IPv6 capability of typical end users is probably lower than what we measure here.

Written by Mirjam Kuehne

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The United States government has cancelled Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Request for Proposal (RFP) SA1301-12-RP-IANA according to an updated page on the FedBizOpps website. The change — time stamped Mar 09, 2012 2:44 pm — states: “The Department of Commerce intends to reissue the RFP at a future date, date to be determined (TBD). Interested parties are encouraged to periodically visit www.fbo.gov for updates.” No further statements have been released as of now.

Update: NTIA official notice issued March 10, 2012

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) remains committed to preserving the stability and security of the Internet’s domain name system (DNS). Critical to the DNS is the continued performance of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions. In anticipation of the impending expiration of the IANA functions contract, NTIA, via two public notices in February and June 2011, consulted on how best to enhance the performance of the IANA functions. Based on the input received from stakeholders around the world, NTIA added new requirements to the IANA functions’ statement of work, including the need for structural separation of policymaking from implementation, a robust companywide conflict of interest policy, provisions reflecting heightened respect for local country laws, and a series of consultation and reporting requirements to increase transparency and accountability to the international community.

On November 10, 2011, the Department of Commerce issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) SA1301-12-RP-IANA for a new IANA functions contract with a deadline of December 19, 2011. The government may cancel any solicitation that does not meet the requirements. Accordingly, we are cancelling this RFP because we received no proposals that met the requirements requested by the global community. The Department intends to reissue the RFP at a future date to be determined (TBD) so that the requirements of the global internet community can be served. Interested parties are encouraged to visit www.fbo.gov for updates.

Other sources: (UPDATED Mar 12, 2012 11:36 AM PDT)
NTIA plays chicken with the IANA contract IGP, Mar.10.2012
ICANN had no idea IANA rejection was coming .nxt, Mar.10.2012
NTIA says ICANN “does not meet the requirements” for IANA renewal DomainIncite, Mar.10.2012
US Government Extends ICANN’s Mandate to Manage IANA for Six Months PCWorld, Mar.12.2012

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The Telecom World converged in greater numbers than ever before on Barcelona last week for the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC). This years’ motto: Redefining Mobile.

To see one of the worlds’ leading automotive industry executives, Ford Motor’s Bill Ford Jr. delivering a keynote was yet another illustration of the growing osmosis between Telecommunications and other industry verticals.

In August 2007 we mused in the Go6 column about IPv6 and communicating swarms of cars; IPv6 was even the topic of a talk at the Geneva Auto Show that year. Back in January 2004 it seemed like a privilege to sit a minute in the ‘Renault IPv6 car’ showcased at the European Union IPv6 launch event. But in retrospect, electronic gear was still too bulky and way too expensive and broadband mobile data communication was still in its infancy; miniaturization and advances in storage and processing power still had a way to go before commercialization of the idea made sense.

Eight years onward, the discussion has shifted to an easy way to endow our cars with a unique internet address. It had been noted that cars already have unique identifiers referred to as VIN (Vehicle Identification Number). A VIN consists of 17 characters and has a standardized format including country, manufacturer, vehicle type and features, model year, plant and serial number. A logical approach would be to map the VIN into an IPv6 address. A cursory search on Google shows that, in march 2011, Samsung received a US patent for “a method to set an internet protocol address using a vehicle identification number”. With everything even remotely patentable being patented, we could extrapolate that soon, everything that can be morphed into an IPv6 address will be chained to the patent mountain.

In the meantime some top brands including BMW already offer a teleservice, that enables the car to transmit vital statistics and to ask a technician to immediately perform a remote check-up if the driver thinks something in the vehicle does not function right. Five years from now, such functionality is likely to be standard fare on most new models coming to market. Will it still be outlandish to consider extending the service to include remote monitoring of the vital signs of an aging driver population? There is no doubt that considerable new revenue opportunities lurk not far below the surface as m2m communications increasingly takes hold in a diverse range of application categories with the prospect of billions of mobile and fixed animate and inanimate entities exchanging actionable information.

Formula One Racing has for more than two decades provided an ideal environment to test and pioneer advanced real-time data transmission between cars and teams of engineers and technicians in charge of these purebreds. Every major racing site is equipped with fiber-optic cables hugging the race track, interspersed with strategically located transmission hubs. Helicopters were even used to beam data up and down between cars and the technicians in case of blind spots. The FIA strictly regulates data acquisition and telemetry. Racing teams and car manufacturers are used to have quasi real-time access to all relevant engine and other car data back in headquarters. This allows for continuous fine tuning and improvement of these complex and sometimes fragile creations of human acumen where precision engineering as well as advanced materials and electronics reigns supreme. Winning advantage can be given by minute but fast adaptations.

The recently announced agreement between Tata Communications and Formula One Management to provide connectivity to the twenty racetracks of the International Formula One Racing season reflects the stringent demands of Formula One Racing where car and communications have become totally interdependent. The other dimension is to meet the high expectations of todays’ fans. Whether sitting in the stands or watching remotely on their HDTV screens, laptops, tablets or even smartphones they increasingly expect an ‘augmented experience’ including access to instant replays, choice of view from different angles or track locations, technical and statistical data, all while chitchatting on their social network of choice. Content hosting and transmission capacity commensurate with the expectations of up to seven million simultaneous users accesses from all over the world on racing day are essential to an overall enjoyable F1 experience.

Whether packets are transmitted in IPv4 or IPv6 formats is irrelevant, only the end-user experience and perception counts. The two formats will coexist while the transition to IPv6 will accelerate. Some of us will even perceive the growing roar generated by IPv6 addressed packets zipping by at gigabit speed as they overtake IPv4.

Rev your engines as this years’ Formula One season debuts on March 18th with the Australian Grand Prix.

Written by Yves Poppe, Director, Business Development IP Strategy at Tata Communications

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About a year ago, we shared some graphs that showed the percentage of IPv6 enabled networks over time. More precisely, it showed the percentage of Autonomous Systems (ASes) that announced one or more IPv6 prefixes in the global routing table. The results for the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) were described in an earlier CircleID post: Uptake of IPv6 in All Regions and on RIPE Labs.

Back when those articles were posted, the percentage of ASes announcing one or more IPv6 prefixes in the five Regional Internet Registry (RIR) service regions were approximately: APNIC 10%, RIPE NCC 8.5%, LACNIC 8.5%, AfriNIC 6% and ARIN 5%.

We looked at the progress since then. In the image below you can see the current status in all regions.

The percentage of IPv6-enabled networks has increased in all regions. Now, the percentage of ASes announcing one or more IPv6 prefixes in the RIR regions are approximately: APNIC 17%, LACNIC and RIPE NCC 14-15%, AfriNIC 11.5% and ARIN 10%.

It is interesting to note that the graphs for most regions show some flattening after a rather steep increase earlier last year (around the time the IANA allocated the last IPv4 address space to the RIRs).

We also looked at the countries with the highest IPv6 penetration worldwide. For more information and other graphs, please refer to the background article on RIPE Labs: Networks with IPv6 – One Year Later. More information about IPv6 can be found on IPv6ActNow.

Written by Mirjam Kuehne

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