APNIC IPv6 transit exchange

[Terry Manderson]

Hi Alexander,

Your comments are much appreciated, not revolutionary - but worth 
saying. :-)

I think I need to clarify the documentation published (and will do so 
as soon as I am free of an airline lounge). The Postel line of "be 
liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send" applies. 
The APNIC v6TE will happily accept full table from any, and pass such 
to those who want to see transit. Alternatively peers may also just 
take the direct sourced routes from the "other" participating AS's.

The reason that I ask for as many offers of transit for this service is 
to pinpoint ISPs who are indeed capable of being a true IPv6 transit 
operator. It will always be far better for them to do it than an RIR. 
That is plainly accepted. Problem is, and I've eluded to this 
previously - the state of transit affairs in the region, for the entire 
region (not just our advanced friends in Japan etc) is pretty dismal 
given the v4 exhaustion predictions.

Clearly (and some astute emails have already identified this) the v6TE 
is a bootstrap mechanism for in-region v6. For those organisations and 
networks who can't easily secure a relationship with an ISP for v6. Any 
engineer worth their salt can enumerate the issues with tunnel and 
overlay networks. Surely people can understand the life-cycle being 
promoted here? 1) Naive network wants v6, joins v6TE. 2) network 
engineers get experience with it, realise tunnels and non-native trunks 
are horrible. 3) network engineers find a better transit arrangement 
and institutionalise v6. 4) network leaves the APNIC v6TE as it 
provides no benefit.

In short, I don't expect the v6TE to exist more than 5 years.. in fact, 
if it does it signals the failure of v6 in-region (you will probably 
flay me for this, but the demonstrated need for the v6TE to exist tends 
to highlight a failure of sorts in v6 adoption). If the v6TE is proven 
to be superfluous in less than 5 years than I'll call it successful in 
what it is geared to do - improve the use and awareness of IPv6 in the 
entire AP region.

Further, if some operators wish to de-preference the v6TE AS, I won't 
argue against them - if fact I encourage sensible engineering efforts. 
For those who wish to take a more extremist approach and block all 
paths that are seen from the v6TE, that is certainly your choice. 
Helping v6 adoption? I don't know. I would like to think you can catch 
more bees with honey, than vinegar.

Cheers
Terry

On 02/12/2007, at 8:01 PM, Alexander Koch wrote:

> Terry,
>
> you have NTT/2914 that does it natively. Also you have 
> Teleglobe/VSNL/6453,
> Global Crossing/3549 and to some extent in that region C+W/1273 and
> Tiscali/3257, without thinking any further who is also available 
> there. Sure,
> those cover not exactly that much area except NTT and partly so 
> Teleglobe, but
> just in case you get asked again.
>
> I take it you also have heard the loud sigh from us v6 folks here. I 
> guess what
> we urge you to do is trying to argue in favour of no 'full tables 
> everywhere'
> and implementing explicit customer vs peering route-maps / policies on 
> this, so
> while doing transit (as bad as it is, butnd I see the need) there is a 
> prefix
> list and all that.
>
> Announcing everything to everyone is bad, it just hurts so badly... 
> quality- wise
> and routing will be a mess. Been there, argued with many, it helped. 
> Think about
> it - it makes more sense for one local player to get native v6 transit 
> somewhere
> and then connect some local ISPs / fellow geeks via tunnels.
>
> Alexander,
> having enjoyed linerate v6 for many many years by now
>
>
--
Terry Manderson                         email:      terry at apnic.net
Network Operations Manager, APNIC       sip:    info at voip.apnic.net
http://www.apnic.net                    phone:      +61 7 3858 3100