Webinar on How to Deploy IPv6 with Mapping Address Translation

07/02/2019

LACNIC organized its first webinar of 2019 together with Cisco, seeking to promote IPv6 deployment in the Latin American and Caribbean region.

More than 200 participants attended this online forum designed to bring the Mapping Address Translation (MAP) transition mechanism closer to LACNIC community professionals and technicians.

MAP is a mechanism we believe is not as popular in our region as it is in others, yet it is an extremely useful tool for transitioning to IPv6, noted Alejandro Acosta, R+D engineer at LACNIC, during the opening of the 90-minute training session.

Full glass and empty glass. According to the statistics LACNIC presented during the webinar, the countries with the highest IPv6 penetration rates among end-users are Uruguay with 32%, Brazil with 27%, Mexico with 23.7%, Ecuador with 19.92%, and Trinidad and Tobago with 18.78%. Likewise, in the past year LACNIC assigned 1,434 IPv6 prefixes and blocks to members throughout the region.  Nevertheless, many of these organizations and companies are not using the IPv6 addresses they have received from LACNIC. In some cases, MAP can serve as a catalyst to promote IPv6 deployment in many networks, Acosta observed.

This may be one of the reasons why IPv6 content is being hosted outside the region. In November 2018, 66% of the websites pointed to IPv6 addresses outside the LACNIC region; in January 2019, this number increased to 78%. “Websites are being hosted in datacenters not located in Latin America and the Caribbean. Sadly, this is content that is leaving our region, causing a loss of income and offering Internet users lower levels of quality,” warned the LACNIC engineer.

The transition of Internet Service Providers from IPv4 to IPv6 depends not only on version 6 of the protocol, but also on proper communication that guarantees the interaction of IP versions 4 and 6 on the same domain. To achieve satisfactory communication between both versions of the Internet Protocol, mechanisms such as MAP are used.

Juan Flores Cibrián, customer support engineer at Cisco, expanded on the technical aspects of MAP, including its two operational modes (MAP-E and MAP-T) as well as its advantages and disadvantages. Cibrián commented that this tool allows connecting IPv4 hosts through IPv6 domains using a mechanism that executes a double translation, that is, from IPv4 to IPv6 and vice versa.

As customary in LACNIC webinars, a live demonstration was included. This time, the Cisco expert demonstrated how to configure MAP and analyzed different screenshots. For those interested in the topic, a video of the webinar is available here.