Tag Archives: IPv6

13 Feb

Indian IPv6 deployment

I had calls with a couple of friends over this week and somehow discussion IPv6 deployment came up. “How much has been IPv6 deployment in India now in 2020” is a very interesting question. It’s often added with – “how much of my traffic will flow over IPv6 once it is enabled“?

Game of numbers

There is a drastic difference in IPv6 deployment depending on which statistic we are looking at here in India. There can be a bunch of factors based on which we can try to judge IPv6 deployment:

  1. How many operators are offering IPv6 to end users?
  2. How many end-users are on IPv6?
  3. How’s the content available on IPv6 in terms of a number of IPv6 enabled websites?
  4. How’s the content available on IPv6 in terms of traffic volume over IPv6?

First two and last two points are related and point towards from vertically opposite ends. (Call it good or bad) the fact of high centralisation. There has been an ongoing centralisation of mobile operators and in-country like ours they connect a very large number of end-users. The number of fixed-line networks has increased considerably but at the same time in proportion to a number of mobile users they user base growth has been much lower.

On the content side like everywhere else in the world, there’s a lot more centralisation of content. Many of my Indian ISP friends tell me that Google + Akamai + Microsoft + Netflix + Facebook + Cloudflare is way over 75% of their traffic. Think about it, that’s just 6 AS number out of 68000+ odd networks in the world as per BGP routing table. Thus by traffic profile, we are looking at 0.0014% networks serving 75% of content traffic. The reason for such centralisation is actually beyond network and more around the success of products of these organisations followed by factors like the winner (or top 3) gets it all in most of these domains.

For eyeball traffic APNIC IPv6 stats for India (source here) as well as Hurricane Electric’s IPv6 progress report (source here) give us some numbers:

  1. Very few fixed-line operators are offering IPv6 but on the mobile side – a large number of mobile networks are offering IPv6. Jio was on IPv6 since launch and as traffic increased, Airtel as well as Vodafone + IDEA also significantly increased their deployment. On fixed line, it’s just Jio + ACT broadband with any sizable IPv6 footprint. BSNL + Airtel have virtually no deployment. There might be some other network in the list but it’s off the radar.
  2. There are a lot more end users on IPv6 than despite the small number of networks offering it because of the large mobile user base. On Jio 80%+ user base, on Airtel, it’s 45%, on Vodafone & IDEA (merged company but still separate ASNs) it’s close to 50%. That’s the number of users who are connecting over IPv6 when given option of IPv4 and IPv6 as tested by APNIC. That number is huge!
  3. Around 98.5% of TLDs (top-level domain names like .com, .net etc) are IPv6 enabled. For .com & .net domains, only 7% of the domains have an AAAA record (compared to ones having an A record). Most of the numbers are much lower if we look at the content side of IPv6 (ignoring the traffic volume).
  4. If we look at the content players with IPv6 and include the traffic volume numbers then it’s way higher. It is estimated that globally somewhere between 20-30 top ASNs carry 90%+ traffic and almost all of those top 20 are IPv6 enabled.

What do all these numbers actually mean?

  1. If you are an eyeball network in India and you deploy IPv6, you can expect way over 70-80% traffic (by volume) on IPv6.
  2. If you are a content network/datacenter in India and application is targetting to home fixed-line / enterprise network, expect a rather low amount of IPv6 traffic but would be rapidly increasing as more fixed-line networks deploy.
  3. If you are a content network/datacenter in India and content hosted at your end attracts mobile traffic, you can expect way over 50%-60% of that mobile traffic over IPv6.

Some additional reasons to consider deploying IPv6

  1. In India, ISPs need to maintain carrier-grade NAT logs of the translations. If one is doing dual-stack, a large part of traffic will flow over IPv6 saving on those logging requirements.
  2. For ISPs, it will save you from significant strain on CGNAT device.
  3. For content network/webmaster/datacenter – IPv6 will help in delivering your traffic outside of (often) congested CGNAT paths.

Happy IPv6ing! 🙂

10 Jul

Calculating IPv6 subnets outside the nibble boundary

Often this comes into the subnetting discussion by my friends who are deploying IPv6 for the first time. How do you calculate subnets outside the 4-bit nibble boundary? This also happens to be one of starting points of APNIC IPv6 routing workshop where I occasionally instruct as community trainer.

So what is a Nibble boundary?

In IPv6 context, it refers to 4 bit and any change in multiple of 4 bits is easy to calculate. Here’s how: Let’s say we have a allocation: 2001:db8::/32. Now taking slices from this pool within 4 bit boundry is quite easy.
/36 slices (1 x 4 bits)
2001:db8:0000::/36
2001:db8:1000::/36
2001:db8:2000::/36
and so on…
/40 slices (2 x 4 bits)
2001:db8:0000::/40
2001:db8:0100::/40
2001:db8:0200::/40
/44 slices (3 x 4 bits)
2001:db8:0000::/44
2001:db8:0010::/44
2001:db8:0020::/44
/48 slices (4 x 4 bits)
2001:db8:0000::/48
2001:db8:0001::/48
2001:db8:0002::/48
Clearly, it seems much simple and that is one of the reasons we often strongly recommend subnetting within the nibble boundary and not outside for all practical use cases. However understanding why it’s easy this way, as well as things like how to subnet outside nibble boundary for cases, say if you are running a very large network and have a /29 allocation from RIR.

Going back to fundamentals

IPv6 address consists of 128 bit addressing and is represented in hexadecimal.
IPv6 address:  _ _ _ _: _ _ _ _ :_ _ _ _ :_ _ _ _ :_ _ _ _ :_ _ _ _ :_ _ _ _ :_ _ _ _ 
Each dash here represents is written in hexadecimal and represents 4 bits, thus 4+4+4+4 = 16 bits in each block and 16 x 8 = 128 bit addressing. This brings that magical 4-bit nibble boundary.
So if we expand 4 bits into binary, we can have following combinations for each “dash” in above representation:

0 0 0 0 
0 0 0 1
0 0 1 0
0 0 1 1 
0 1 0 0 
0 1 0 1
0 1 1 0
0 1 1 1 
1 0 0 0 
1 0 0 1 
1 0 1 0
1 0 1 1 
1 1 0 0 
1 1 0 1
1 1 1 0
1 1 1 1

Here I have simply represented 4 bits from lowest to highest. Remember just like in the decimal system with base 10 (which we all are familiar with), we follow same logic in binary system where we start from lowest (0 0 0 0) and go to next digital (0 0 0 1) and now since it’s base 2, we go to next logical number which is (0 0 1 0) and so on. Now when we modify these 4 bits together, we do not have to worry about the decimal part but as soon as we try to go inside the 4-bit zone, we have to deal with the decimal counting.
So let’s take a real-world case of American Cable & broadband provider Comcast. They have an allocation 2001:558::/31:

NetRange: 2001:558:: - 2001:559:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF
CIDR: 2001:558::/31
NetName: COMCAST6NET
NetHandle: NET6-2001-558-1
Parent: ARIN-001 (NET6-2001-400-0)
NetType: Direct Allocation
OriginAS: AS7922
Organization: Comcast Cable Communications, LLC (CCCS)
RegDate: 2003-01-06
Updated: 2016-08-31
Ref: https://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET6-2001-558-1

What exactly /31 means here?

Going back by CIDR fundamentals /31 means 31 bits are reserved and remaining (128-31 i.e 97 bits) are available. How can they generate /32 or say /36 out of this allocation?
2001:558::/31
Writing in expanded form:
2001:0558::/31
(16 bits + 15 bits)
In above, first 16 bits are reserved for 2001 but for next part “0558” only 15 bits are reserved. Let’s expand the 2nd block further:
0 5 5 8 – 15 bits reserved
Here “0” gives 4 bits (and in binary is 0 0 0 0)
5 gives 4 bits (and in binary is 0 1 0 1)
Next 5 also reserves 4 bits
So far we are at (4 + 4 + 4) 12 bit count. Now that 15 bits are reserved, basically from “8” 3 bits are reserved and rest 1 bit is available for modification.
Let’s expand 8:
8 in hexadecimal = 1 0 0 0 in binary. Here 1 0 0  is reserved (each representing one binary bit and hence the three bits) and 4th bit can vary.
Hence possible combinations in binary are:
1 0 0 0
1 0 0 1
The remaining first three bits (1 0 0 ) cannot be altered as they are part of network mask. Now 1 0 0 0 in binary gives us “8” in hexadecimal and 1 0 0 1 gives us “9”. Thus possible /32s out of this /31 allocation are:
2001:558::/31 = 2001:558::/32  and 2001:559::/32
Similarly to calculate /36 slices from it, we can basically vary this 1 bit (as we just did) as well as next 4 bits altogether (5-bit variation). Hence possible /36 slices are:
2001:558:0000::/36
2001:558:1000::/36
2001:558:2000::/36
2001:558:3000::/36
and so on until 2001:558:f000::/36 (16 pools here)
and next,
2001:559:0000::/36
2001:559:1000::/36
2001:559:2000::/36
2001:559:3000::/36
and so on until 2001:559:f000::/36 (16 pools here). Thus we get these 32 /36 blocks out of /31 allocations.
That’s all about IPv6 subnetting. Once you understand this part, you should be just fine with subnetting in the future. 🙂