On Sat, 26 Dec 2015, Mark Tinka wrote:
None of the major mobile carriers in eastern, western, central and southern Africa have done anything IPv6-related on their network that I am aware about. The availability of IPv4 space in the AFRINIC region, coupled with the ease of spending millions on CG-NAT's vs. rolling out IPv6 means unless they start, someone's pants will be at their knees in a non-picturesque way very soon.
Well, in Europe and Asia, the amount of providers that have rolled out IPv6 is not zero, but I'd say it's in the 5-10% range or something like that.
It's easier to roll out IPv6 in a mobile network if you can do it single stack, so Apple supporting IPv6 only is a major step forward (this is due to the IPv6 bearer type was introduced around 12-14 years ago, whereas the IPv4v6 bearer type is less than 5 years old and was initially a 4G only thing).
The lack of interest, head-in-the-sand approach is quite alarming, particularly as mobile networks are increasingly carrying the majority of consumer data traffic in Africa, year-in, year-out.
A lot of providers who have rolled out IPv6 have predominantly done so because they happen to have employed good engineers and empowered them to do things over longer time, keeping IPv6 costs down because they were done during normal hardware/software cycles, instead of a short intensive project that cost a lot of money.
I imagine that doing IPv6 single stack rollout in mobile starting now, you could be done in 1-2 years without major costs incurred, because now the handset landscape has matured enough that there are a good set of devices that support (or will support) IPv6 single stack properly. 2-3 years back, this just wasn't the case for generic bought-in-the-electronics-store 3GPP featurephone or smartphone. It's still the case that if a large part of your customer base has simple phones or feature phones, IPv6 support isn't needed. So while I do not agree that it's a great business strategy to wait even longer, I can understand those who have waited because they saw it as too hard to do, potentially because they didn't have the skilled engineers to do it. If they start now or during 2016, it's going to be a lot easier for them compared to the ones who started in 2010.
I guess there are major differences across the continent as to what network gear is used, but I know some operators who shipped their 10 year old 2G basestations to African providers, and if these are still in use, potentially even without a support contract, then these will never support IPv6 properly. Networks built like this will be laggards just the same way people running old routers won't have the right features to support IPv6 properly.
However, if you have 3G basestations with support contracts (or that at least have software updated in the last 5-10 years), then getting IPv6 only working should be perfectly doable if they upgrade the core of their mobile network.
-- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swm...@swm.pp.se
