South African IPv6 Usage

Over the past while Simeon’s blog has had a few posts concerning IPv6, and this alongside a few other posts that I’ve come across essentially indicate a very sad state of IPv6 in South Africa.

A quick check on Sixxs shows that while there’s a whole lot of allocations, many aren’t seen on the internet at all. We (AS37105) have had our network fully IPv6-capable for quite some time and we’ve even tested native IPv6 connectivity (dual-stack and IPv6-only) delivered to the customer over iBurst‘s network on a PPPoE session, so with all this IPv6 and no-one to send packets to we started looking at who we could get online. We’ve had a pretty good relationship with JAWUG over the years, and as of last night we’re transiting a bit of best-effort IPv6 for them. One of our customers, SA Digital Villages, has also had an IPv6 allocation for some time and their transit is now IPv6-enabled as well.

Here’s to hoping for more IPv6 in SA soon!

 

P.S. In another post I’ll explain why it’s hard to get IPv6 to a Telkom DSL customer in South Africa natively.