LACNIC Board Calls on the Community to Promote IPv6 Deployment
November 28, 2019
The RIPE-NCC recently announced that their pool of available IPv4 addresses has been exhausted and called for greater progress on IPv6. This had already occurred in the APNIC and ARIN regions a few years ago. LACNIC has been informing that, in our region, IPv4 address space will be exhausted by mid-2020.
LACNIC has been implementing in-person training activities since 2005 and we have been offering online courses on IPv6 since 2015. These initiatives have allowed us to train more than 23,700 professionals.
Compared to the others, our region has the highest percentage of members that have already received IPv6 address space. To date, in addition to IPv4 addresses, more than 95% of our members have already received an IPv6 assignment. Likewise, we also have the highest percentage of IPv6 enabled networks, with approximately 45% of the region's 9,000 autonomous systems announcing IPv6.
Despite all of this, the effective deployment of networks with IPv6 traffic in our region is still approximately 20%, a figure lower than global deployment levels, which are at almost 30%.
The LACNIC community has always managed to stay ahead of IPv4 exhaustion. Since 2009, it has generated policies (rules that govern the assignment of resources) to make a better use of the remaining IPv4 address space and favor new entrants, while at the same time it has defined policies to facilitate IPv6 deployment in the region.
For the reasons mentioned above, on behalf of the LACNIC Board and in line with the announcement recently published by the RIPE-NCC, we invite you to accelerate IPv6 deployment in the networks of the region.
Therefore, it is up to the various actors involved to take effective measures for the deployment of IPv6. While network operators and Internet service providers (ISPs) play a key role in this deployment, other actors such as academic networks, government agencies and companies in general also have an active part to play.
In 2017, 2018 and 2019, LACNIC has made great efforts to communicate the strategic relevance of IPv6 deployment, approaching decision-makers at operators, regulators, universities and the government agencies responsible for the sector’s public policies in order to encourage their understanding of this deployment, and we are convinced that maintaining this dialogue with non-technical actors will be essential in the coming years.
Finally, we invite the LACNIC community to work on promoting the development of policies that will accelerate the effective deployment of IPv6 above other policies that may be discussed at a later date.