Invariably I find the most entertaining distractions when I’m supposed to be focussing all my attention on time sensitive ‘stuff’.
Today is no exception, instead of finalising my Best Man’s speech for Mark Loxton (Overstreet) I prodded Telkom into getting IPv6 peering live with them at last.
With the brilliant assistance of Pieter Bezuidenhout we got all the bits up and running in minutes! It’s always such a pleasure dealing with engineers who know what they’re doing and actually understand you when to speak ‘technie’.
Having now added Telkom to the mix, I can proudly say that we’re one of the best connected IPv6 networks in South Africa. We now have 3 independent IPv6 upstreams and are making a strong push to get anyone and everyone in SA with “live” V6 space to peer. We are already peering with 4 of the local V6 players and hope to expand that to include all local IPv6 participants (at JINX that is) as soon as possible.
For a quick list of who in SA has IPv6 space – Sixxs provide a very nice tool: http://www.sixxs.net/tools/grh/dfp/all/?country=za
During my visit to Kenya next week I’ll see what can be done to get KDN peering V6 with us as well…. Time for V6 to get used properly across Africa!
We’re also providing some best effort IPv6 transit to some of the local guys and who knows – it may become something we push into on a commercial basis soon.
Our next push is towards dealing with IPv6 only scenarios a little better – while we’re dual stack across most of the network I’d like us to be ready to native IPv6 as a customer facing option in the very near future. For this to work we need Telkom’s IPConnect product to go live with some long overdue changes – I’m still quitely hopeful we could see their BitStream product by September….One of the other hold-ups here would be in getting NAT64 commercailly stable — I see a bit of work here 😉
Ok, I’m rambling and STILL avoiding my duties for speech preparation so let me get back to it ..