Connectivity to Latin American NRENs

[Bernhard Schmidt]

Hello everyone,

this is my usual whining about the sad state of the global IPv6 routing
in certain parts of the DFZ. Today's episode is about the mess one has
to cross when trying to reach most educational destinations in Latin
America as well as Canada. I've tried to reach someone responsible by
mail for the last four weeks, but failed to get any response.

There seems to be a subcontinental educational network called CLARA
(AS27750) which seems to serve as educational backbone for most if not
all Latin American NRENs, just like GEANT or Abilene. CLARA is
interconnected to both GEANT and Abilene which makes, apart from some
exceptions, IPv6 to perform about equally to IPv4 - seen from the
educational world.

However, just like e.g. Abilene used to in the beginning, CLARA does not
provide any transit to the commercial world. This is where our friends
at UNAM.MX (AS278) jump in and provide that entire CLARA cloud upstream
to the commercial world. Unfortunately, UNAM.MX itself is a tunnel shop
specialized in world sightseeing, uplinked to Lava.net (Hawaii) which is
uplinked to ChungHwa Telecom (Taiwan, maybe with some equipment in US)
uplinked to Sprint. Example path

2001:1338::/32	8767 3549 6175 17715 6435 278 18592 27750 27807 20312 i

this is a prefix holding two ccTLD nameservers (ns[12].nic.ve) with glue
in the root-zone and all other whistles and bells.

As one might imagine, the performance on this path is less than optimal.
I set up a smokeping when I started to contact UNAM and it looks rather
horrible -
http://noc.birkenwald.de/smokeping/smokeping.cgi?target=World.America.nicve

Current mtr output (Smokeping looks rather good at this moment)
HOST: svr02.teleport-iabg.de      Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
  1. backbone2-gige-0-3-15.telepo  0.0%    20    0.7   4.6   0.5  47.3  11.8
  2. mchn-s1-rou-1030.DE.euroring  0.0%    20    2.5   2.6   2.2   2.8   0.2
  3. hmb-s2-rou-1030.DE.eurorings  0.0%    20   17.5  17.4  17.0  17.8   0.2
  4. sl-bb1v6-nyc-t-28.sprintv6.n  0.0%    20  108.4 108.4 107.9 108.9   0.2
  5. sl-bb1v6-rly-t-1003.sprintv6  0.0%    20  184.3 184.5 184.1 185.8   0.4
  6. 2001:ca0:1::1:1               5.0%    20  495.6 495.6 488.4 499.5   2.9
  7. tunnel-chttl-lavanoc.lava.ne  5.0%    20  500.1 496.2 489.8 500.1   2.6
  8. 3ffe:8070:1:13::1            15.0%    20  608.5 570.0 558.8 608.5  13.0
  9. 2001:1228:11b:90a::1         10.0%    20  811.2 819.2 790.9 974.5  39.6
 10. 2001:1228:10a:f09::1          5.0%    20  827.9 834.9 803.5 1045.  56.3
 11. 2001:1228:10a:f02::2         10.0%    20  820.3 859.9 802.9 1118.  97.0
 12. 2001:1348:1:2::1             10.0%    20  812.8 847.1 797.9 1062.  77.5
 13. 2001:1348::e                 10.0%    20  818.5 842.5 804.9 1006.  58.4
 14. 2001:1348:1:17::2            15.0%    20  658.1 678.7 653.2 801.4  40.5
 15. 2800:30:ffff::2              10.0%    20  662.3 687.0 647.7 863.7  54.9
 16. 2001:1338:ffff:3::1           5.3%    19  656.2 679.7 649.9 937.4  66.4
 17. 2001:1338:ffff::2            21.1%    19  656.5 700.2 650.3 1032. 108.4
 18. ns1.nic.ve                   15.8%    19  666.0 705.0 651.1 976.8 102.8

Similar issues apply to CA*net (Canadian NREN), which also seems to
think it does not need any global upstream. Smokeping (seen from
AS29259) is at
http://noc.birkenwald.de/smokeping/smokeping.cgi?target=World.America.canet
the current path is

2001:410::/32	8767 3549 6175 17715 6435 278 18592 27750 6509

		286 1273 6830 6830 6830 6830 6939 6939 6939 6939 2516 \
		7660 22388 11537 6509

So why am I writing this? First, I failed to reach anyone at the
affected ASNs, which makes me think the only hope is some direct
face-to-face contact of someone reading this mail knowing someone in
charge.  Second, there are at least two networks out there that are
currently trying hard to become something that could be called a Tier-1
in the IPv6 world, giving away free transit whereever possible and
partially resorting to cheap blame games.  While I do not think this is 
a bright idea in general and don't approve it, here in this case giving
(free) commercial transit to CLARA and/or CA*net, even with a short
tunnel, might be beneficiary (for the educational networks, for the
willing transit and, ultimately, for the entire IPv6 deployment).

Unfortunately, by publishing AAAA records in DNS that point to such
badly reachable prefixes they might break _my_ IPv6-deployed clients
(well, not the clients, the user's experience with IPv6) which is
something I'd like to avoid.

Does anyone have responsible contacts there and could jump in to provide
a communication channel with willing upstreams? I did some short checks,
almost none of the existing commercial (!) IPv4-transits of the Latin
American networks seem to be active in IPv6, so that road is probably
blocked.

Thanks,
Bernhard