Brazilian Transition to IPv6 process. Essay done for Introduction to Internet Governance course from Diplo Foundation

1. ESSAY: BRAZILIAN TRANSITION TO IPV6
Nathalia Sautchuk Patrício
nathalia.sautchuk@gmail.com
IANA is responsible to redistribute the IP addresses to regional authorities, and
these do the same for domestic entities, or designate directly to end users. In
2011, the IPv4 addresses had ended in the IANA central stock.
Huston (2015) is the APNIC chief scientist (IPs Regional Registration for the Asia
and Pacific region) and publishes studies on the exhaustion of IPv4 on his
website1
. In the graph 1, from his website, it is possible to see the projection of
the IPv4 depletion in each area.
In Latin America and the Caribbean there is LACNIC that is responsible for IP
distribution in this area. LACNIC marks a part of that block to the NIC.br, which
is responsible for distributing it in Brazil. Finally, the NIC.br assigns IP address
blocks to end users or ISPs.
According to IPv6.br (2014), on June 10, 2014, three years after Asia and
almost two years after Europe, the stock of IPv4 addresses unallocated in
LACNIC region is ended. It means the stock has reached the limit of
approximately 4 million free addresses and this marks a change in the address
1 http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/
Graph 1: Projection of IPv4 depletion in the world (Source: Huston, 2015)

2. allocation policies.
LACNIC (2015) has stipulated that the IPv4 allocations will be a maximum of
1024 addresses (/ 22) even there is a justification for a larger space, and can
be made every six months. For this policy there are the equivalent of 2 million
addresses reserved. After this stock ends, the allocations will be made only to
organizations that do not have previous allocations.
The IPv6 protocol is the IPv4 successor. Because IPv4 depletion the transition to
IPv6 is essential to allow the continuity of Internet growth. IPv6 transition
means that IPv4 and IPv6 will coexist for some years. There is not a prevision to
IPv4 deactivation.
The transition to IPv6 is very slow around the world. According Google (2015),
approximately 5% of its user accesses Google over IPv6. In the world, the best
countries in terms of IPv6 adoption are Belgium (30,79%), Germany (14,17%)
and United States (13,99%). When we look to IPv6 adoption in South America,
the best country is Peru (12,38%), while Brazil has only 0,97% of IPv6 adoption
(Google, 2015).
In the Brazil, this process is very late. NIC.br makes available some data about
the IPv6 adoption in Brazil. In the graph 2 it is possible to compare the IPv6 use
in .br sites, in top 1000 sites and in the top 1M sites. Pink bars indicate the
percentage of sites that have IPv6 address and blue bars indicate the
percentage of sites that are accessible via IPv6.
To do this graph it was used the ranking available in the Alexa service. Alexa is
a service that calculates a ranking for websites, which measures its popularity.
There is a public list, ordered, with one million (1M) of the most popular sites.
It was tested 22,432 .br domains and 12.56% have IPv6 address but only
Graph 2: IPv6 adoption in sites (Source: CEPTRO.br, no date)

3. 11.85% are accessible via IPv6 (CEPTRO.br, 2015).
It is important to note that despite the IPv6 adoption rate among the 1000
most visited sites on the web is significantly higher than the rest, this is due to
Google search site. As its many variations in different ccTLDs occupy many of
the positions of the most accessed sites, and how it responds to IPv6, the
number statistics of sites that accept IPv6 are somewhat distorted. Excluding
this, the adoption of the top 1000 is quite similar to the rest of the Web.
NIC.br maintains various Internet Exchange Points in Brazil that are called PTT
Metro. The PTT Metro São Paulo is the main point of the Brazilian traffic
exchange, where many Internet providers and other networks interconnect to
exchange Internet traffic (PTT.br, 2015). Another very interesting data are the
exchange Internet traffic rates via IPv6 in this PTT Metro.
As we
can see
in the
graphs 3
and 4,
extracted from PTTMetro site2
, the average of exchange internet traffic is 432
Gbps per minute, and from this total only 1.82 Gbps per minute are IPv6 traffic.
To have a comparative point, we can see the IPv6 traffic in AMS-IX, that is one
of the largest traffic exchange point in the world (AMS-IX, 2015). The graph 5
shows the average of exchange internet traffic that is 2.217 Tb/s, and from this
total only 18 Gbps are IPv6 traffic as shown in graph 6.
2 http://ptt.br/trafego/agregado/sp
Graph 3: Total exchange internet traffic rates in PTTMetro São Paulo
(Source: PTT.br, 2015)
Graph 4: IPv6 exchange internet traffic rates in PTTMetro São Paulo
(Source: PTT.br, 2015)

4. To
change the IPv6 scenario in Brazil, NIC.br has a project named IPv6.br that
aims to disseminate IPv6 in Brazil. Among the initiatives of this project there
are free courses in various Brazilian states, with theory and practice in a multi-
vendor laboratory for Internet providers and other Autonomous Systems.
Between 2009 and 2011 about 1,700 people were trained in these courses. It is
also offered courses about IPv6 in e-learning format (IPv6, no date).
The teaching material of these courses were developed by NIC.br and are
available under Creative Commons license, and they can be used freely to
disseminate knowledge in schools and universities.
The initiatives also include the free IPv6 transit for trials by members of the PTT
Graph 6: IPv6 exchange internet traffic rates in AMS-IX (Source: AMS-IX, 2015)
Graph 5: Total exchange internet traffic rates in AMS-IX (Source: AMS-IX, 2015)

5. Metro São Paulo, lectures at universities, at business and technology events
and hosting events about IPv6 (IPv6, 2015).
Through the collected data for this essay it was possible to make comparisons
with other countries on the IPv6 transition issue. Despite the transition to IPv6
is late in Brazil, we can see that the global scenario is not very different.
However, there is a growing concern in Brazil to understand better how this
protocol works due to the IPv4 addresses depletion. The NIC.br has a very
prominent role in the knowledge dissemination on this subject in the country.
REFERENCES
AMS-IX (2015) IPv6 Traffic. Available at https://ams-
ix.net/technical/statistics/sflow-stats/ipv6-traffic [accessed 22 March 2015].
CEPTRO.br (no date) Top Sites. Available at
http://topsites.ceptro.br/topsites/index.jsp [accessed 22 March 2015].
Google (2015) Statistics – IPv6 Adoption. Available at
http://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=ipv6-adoption
[accessed 22 March 2015].
Google (2015) Statistics – Per-country IPv6 Adoption. Available at
http://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-country-ipv6-
adoption [accessed 22 March 2015].
Huston G (2015) IPv4 Address Report. Available at
http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/ [accessed 22 March 2015].
IPv6.br (2014) Home. Available at http://ipv6.br [accessed 22 March 2015].
IPv6.br (no date) Quem somos. Available at http://ipv6.br/quem [accessed 22
March 2015].
LACNIC (2015) Manual de Políticas - Políticas sobre o esgotamento do espaço
de endereçamento IPv4. Available at
http://www.lacnic.net/pt/web/lacnic/manual-11 [accessed 22 March 2015].
PTT.br (2015) Agregado Total (São Paulo). Available at
http://ptt.br/trafego/agregado/sp [accessed 22 March 2015].