Internet Geolocation at LACNIC 26

31/08/2016

Users who cannot access e-government services because their IP addresses appear to have been assigned to a neighboring country. Acompany complaining because its IP addresses appear to be located in a city of the same name as the one where it operates but is in fact thousands of miles away.

These two recent examples occurred in Latin America and the Caribbean and have bought to center stage the question of Internet Geolocation, one of the topics that will be debated during the LACNIC 26 LACNOG 16 event to be held in late September in Costa Rica (http://www.lacnic.net/web/eventos/lacnic26). Geolocation is the process of finding the exact physical location of a computer based on its IP address.

Carlos Martinez, Chief Technology Officer at LACNIC, notes that IPv4 exhaustion is starting to uncover “hidden problems,” such as IP geolocation, the exact place where an Internet address is located regardless of who it belongs to.

According to Martinez, LACNIC and the other Regional Internet Registries “cannot guarantee geolocation information” and that their obligation is to maintain legal information regarding who has received IP addresses. “We record the physical address of the organization to which IP addresses are given,” noted Martinez.

Nevertheless, LACNIC’s CTO understands that this discussion should be promoted among the regional community so that its members will have the tools they need and a better understanding of who is using IP addresses. In this sense, the LACNIC 26 event in Costa Rica will host a geolocation forum that will analyze and discuss various situations reported in Latin America and the Caribbean.

IPv6 and the Internet of Things. The meeting in Costa Rica will also focus on the status of IPv6 deployment in the LAC region and the major challenges the Internet of Things (IoT) is facing in Latin America and the Caribbean. Two renowned experts will share their knowledge on these topics: German expert Carsten Bormann and Colombian engineer Gabriel Montenegro.
In a recent article published in the IETF Journal, Bormann noted the challenge of creating protocols for the devices that are not yet connected to the Internet.

In the words of Bormann and his colleague Ari Keränen, “A true Internet of Things (IoT) requires “things” to be able to use Internet Protocols. Various ‘things’ have always been on the Internet, and general-purpose computers at data centers and homes are usually capable of using the Internet protocols as they have been defined for them. However, there is considerable value in extending the Internet to more constrained devices that often need optimized versions or special use of these protocols.”