The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Geneva, Switzerland, from 17 to 21 December 2017. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> LEON SANCHEZ: Good morning, everyone. So it's six minutes past the hour. So I guess it would be good if we could begin. So I invite you to take your seats.
So welcome to this workshop on public policies to deploy IPv6 in developing countries. Successful international experiences which was organized by Mexico and LACNIC. We thank our organizers for hosting us.
And the speakers for this session will be Tanya, Valentina Scialpi, and Rosa Delgado, Paul Wilson from APNIC, Laura Kaplan from LACNIC, and Carolina Aguerre from University of Santiago, and the director of the National Internet Exchange of India.
So the idea of this session is to listen on speakers of IPv6 in developing countries and how public policies have fostered these deployments and to learn a little bit about where public policy is going into expanding IPv6 adoption.
We will try to make this as interactive as possible. We are aware that you might have already been in too many workshops so far and we don't want to make this a monologue. Instead, we want this to be a dialogue and to be constructive about it. So what we propose is that we listen to our speakers in the first intervention and after that, we suggest that we break up into groups to discuss four main topics, which I will ‑‑ I will enumerate as the main pillars of IoT development. These two topics will be treated in one subgroup, and then the successful experiences for IPv6 deployment and the future of IPv4 addressed. That will be dealt with in another subgroup.
So the objective of breaking into subgroups is to, of course, foster the discussion between the audience and the speakers. And try to reach some conclusions, and some cautions to then share with the wider audience and, of course, to document this output from our workshop.
So I would now like to handle the floor to Tanya Alvia Trapola, to share her thoughts on how IoT may aid in deploying IPv6.
Tanya, you have the floor.
>> PANELIST: I come from the Mexico. I want to talk to you about our IPv6 deployment and what is happening in our country.
So first of all, we needed to understand what was the status of IPv6 in Mexico and at the beginning of this year, we had less than 1% of IPv6 traffic in our country. This was a concern for us. So what we did first was to issue a questionnaire. It was published at the IFT website and we wanted to understand what were the main reasons for this ‑‑ such 1% traffic. It's nothing!
So the questionnaire was intended to be fulfilled by the ISPs but also by the academia, by civil organizations, and the public in general. And so to make sure that we received all answers, we made it compulsory for the ISPs to answer to the questionnaire.
Of not adopting IPv6 some technicality, but what we found out is that most of the time people don't know the advantages or the benefits of IPv6. [ Audio interrupted ]
So then from the regulation perspective, we also in Mexico have a very special case. There is one big player that has, like, more than 60% of the market. I'm not going to name them but I guess you can guess who it is. So this player has not connected to the ISP in Mexico. We made it mandatory for them to connect to the ISP and connect to the IPv6 connections. This happened in July this year. In November ‑‑ so last month ‑‑ the IFT has published the minimum technical requirements for interconnection between telecommunication networks, and it is mandatory that within four years, all interconnections should be using IP technology, and IPv6 is mandatory.
So lastly, to tackle the problem of a lack of information, in the following weeks, we will be launching a micro site, which is a web page, within the IFT website, that will include information about IPv6, training material, also the tools to communicate with final users to answer their questions, and also that we will publish a best practices manual and this is intended also for other government institutions that are trying to transition to IPv6, and also whenever the government wants to purchase IT systems or equipment, we propose that it's mandatory that it requires IPv6 connection.
We know that regulation alone won't solve the problem but we also know that the development of professional skills is very important, and it's not ‑‑ we have been seeing an increase in IPv6 traffic.
Last week, we have already 5% of IPv6 traffic. I know it may be not that much, but remember, it's five times what we had six months ago. So thank you.
>> LEON SANCHEZ: Thank you very much, Tanya. So what I take from what you have just told us is that in some way, the telecommunications institute in Mexico is hoping that by making it mandatory for the dominant player in the market to adopt IPv6 and by requiring the government to acquire equipment that is IPv6 ready, then hopefully the deployment of IPv6 will actually grow. Is that right?
>> PANELIST: Yes. Because whatever the biggest ISP does, it will highly reflect on the whole market, because it's more than 60% of the users. And we think that also with this mayer being in the ISP, it will foster the development of more ISP networks points because we ‑‑ we took to the people that are managing the ISP in Mexico. It's a nonprofit organization, and they were telling us they want to open more ISPs but if the biggest ISP is not there, the others don't want to come because in the end they want to connect with the biggest network.
So, yes, we are hoping it will foster the deployment.
>> LEON SANCHEZ: Thank you very much, I would like to give the floor to Valentina Scialpi. Valentina, the floor is yours.
I'm really sorry. So next I have Rosa Delgado. Would you like to share the Peruvian experience on IPv6 deployment?
>> ROSA DELGADO: Hello, yes. Yes, well, before ‑‑ thank you very much for an invitation and I'm very pleased here. I just wanted to tell you the study about Peru.
I think it was something very important for Peru in the case that today in the academia, in the universities and private sector even government peoples know what is IPv6, but I think it stops about that, but at least they know ‑‑ they know that probably some benefits will come with it. What happened in Peru, it was in the year 2009, Telefonica of Peru, realized they didn't have more IPv4 addresses for Peru in 2012. No more addresses at all. They were trying to decide what to do, because they have three years to go. And at that moment, Telefonica of Madrid were looking for a country where to start from scratch a country. Telefonica, the majority of operators, even in 2011, 2012, didn't know how to move a full country, a full region in IPv6. And I think Telefonica, they needed that. They needed a test bed. Peru was chosen. At that moment, they start to do the project and what Telefonica did, it was not to go ‑‑ not to pass some users to IPv6.
He passed a whole number of users in Lima. Lima was almost for Telefonica, almost IPv6, all the users of Telefonica. So what happened, at that moment is that all of the people, the users, they start to create the traffic in the IPv6 and everybody was saying, what happened with Peru? I mean it was even on the fifth place in the world at that time.
And everybody was very surprised, including Telefonica, I must tell you. So that was a good point for us, at that moment, because that has pushed maybe governments and especially private sector to think a bit more about how important is ICT for companies, for the government. I must tell you, there's not much movement, but in this year in 2017, the government decided to put a law, what the ‑‑ all the offices of state ‑‑ the state offices will move to IPv6, will start to move by 2018. So some things are happening, and I think it was very good for us, but also wanted to share with you that countries like Ecuador, like Bolivia, suddenly, they were first on the list in IPv6 traffic. Countries like never before, I think they were moving sometime in the Pacific, which more or less the traffic, or the innovation was on the Atlantic side, Argentina, Brazil.
This time there was really a shake on the Pacific and that for me has been very, very good, but anyway, I think it was still there. What I find the problems ‑‑ I don't know if there are barriers but I can tell the barriers if Peru, are like in most country, capacity building, trying to build up workshops, events, but I think one of the main problems I find at least in Peru is that the main staff, the management staff in the government, in academia and in the private sector do not know what IPv6, they don't know how they can really take benefit of that.
And I think for the moment, we are trying with universities, for starting in 2018, is to start to make workshops or even top level management, academia, to tell them, explain to them, how they can benefit from IPv6.
For us the problem is not to move any more to IPv6. We are there, but we not using very much. So I think that's what I wanted to share.
Thank you.
>> LEON SANCHEZ: Thank you very much, Rosa.
This is a different experience from what I heard from Mexico. It seems to me that while Mexico is trying to make mandatory deployment of IPv6, then the counterpart in Peru seems to have been adopting IPv6 by the rules of the market as the main player, the mobile player, which I believe is one of the boosters to descend or deploy, or make Peru a pilot project for IPv6. So it's very interesting to see how both models may play differently and with, of course, different challenges and different rates of success.
So now, I would like to handle the floor to Paul Wilson to share with us some thoughts and experiences on IPv6.
>> PAUL WILSON: Thank you, Leon. I'm Paul Wilson from APNIC, the IP addresses for the Asia Pacific. We are responsible for managing the IP addresses in the area.
We have been allocate, IPv6 and supporting v6 for our users for many, many years and we have been talking about it for many, many years including here in the IGF and I guess it doesn't need to be argued any more that IGF is actually a necessity eventually for the growth of the Internet, which it's the so‑called IoT which is actually just the Internet, or traditional growth of the Internet through the normal deployment, through cable and mobile usage. It's growing rapidly. It will keep on growing rapidly, and it will keep going for many, many years.
It really doesn't need to be argued, I hope, anymore, just on the basis of numbers that 4 billion addresses in IPv4 is simply not enough to allow the Internet to keep growing the way it was designed to be built in the first place.
If we go back a couple of years, there were genuine debates going on about whether IPv6 would succeed at all, because it had been bumping along the bottom for many years. We were talking about IPv6 for well over a decade and the deployment wasn't happening. I'm glad to say that those debates are actually over now, undoubtedly for the last couple of years there's been a very healthy exponential growth which has brought us now to about 15% of all users in the world having IPv6 capability. So that's a huge number of users using the Internet on a daily basis, using IPv6, close to a billion users.
At the content end, Google was one of the drivers. They hit 20% of their traffic being delivered over IPv6 which again is a vast amount of traffic. No one can doubt anymore that IPv6 is here to stay because these changes are very rapid and they seem to be continuing.
I'm often asked about what is the role and the future of IPv4 because, of course, IPv4 is all over the Internet. In fact, you still these days cannot connect to the Internet in a full way without having access to IPv4 addresses from your end point because there's a lot of content and services that are only available on the IPv4. So the IPv4 Internet is continuing to grow because the Internet grows and v6 is being deployed and many providers for all sorts of reasons are continuing to use IPv4 and the fact that the addresses are almost exhausted raise the question where do the addressed come from. And basically there's a couple of courses after dresses. You either have, from your local Internet address registry, you have availability of a very small amount of IPv4 address base for every network that need it's and we make that available because as I say, v4 is still absolutely essential for connectivity to the Internet, but the way that v4 address space needs to be used is through network address translation, which is the technology that allows one address to be shared by potentially thousands and thousands of users, and that's exactly the sort of downside of continuing the IPv4 Internet. The fact that you are using network address translators, sometimes in two layers that takes your packets from the Internet, translates them through a couple of ‑‑ up to a couple of stages of intermediary address space and that all happens ‑‑ has to happen in realtime in the course of every connection and every packet that flows on the net.
We have got another session later this morning, actually, about carrier grade nat, except to say it's a huge cost and a huge efficiency cost. And that provides a great incentive to be using IPv6, but it doesn't sort of prevent the need for IPv4 while IPv4 is still used on the Internet. You can use it on an open market. It's possible in much of the world to ‑‑ if you need IPv4 address space, if you can find a consenting donor, you can make an arrangement to purchase address space and have that ‑‑ that transfer of address space properly registered in the databases which is an essential part of using that address space.
So there is a market. It's not a very transparent market. It's hard to say what's going on out there, but the sort of average benchmark figure, as a price for an IPv4 address is about $10 per address. And that's ‑‑ that's actually a relatively small amount in terms of the per user use of that address space because an ISP might actually assign that address space ‑‑ that address permanently to a user and earn about $10 a month from that address, as ‑‑ which against $10 purchase price is pretty good or they might take that address and share it amongst thousands of users at effectively less than a cent per user, again at a $10 cost.
But you don't buy individual IPv4 addresses, you buy them as an ISP or you use them as an ISP in large blocks. So a very large ISP that might need what we could call a slash eight, 16 million addresses, that kind of amount of address space is worth $160 million. So that becomes a much different prospect in terms of where that financing is coming from. So we're not seeing a huge amount of movement of IPv4 addresses in this way, and that's ‑‑ and that's okay, because the alternative to all of this is to get moving on IPv6 and that's exactly what ISPs are doing, weighing the technical and the financial aspects of v6 transition and deployment, and making decisions in their own way in their own time to deploy addresses. And as we heard, it could be happening a city base or a service basis. The most successful examples that we see are what we call greenfield deployments. If you don't have an existing network. If you want to build a new service, then IPv6 is available and it's possible to do that and probably the best example that we have of that at the moment which is shot India into the second place globally in terms of percentage deployment and the first place in terms of the number of users, that's the case of Reliance GO and I guess Rajesh may have a bit to say about that. It's the leading and best example out of many, actually of a successful IPv6 deployment these days.
I probably said enough. So thank you.
>> LEON SANCHEZ: Thank you very much, Paul, for this very interesting points, and I take from what you said that we have challenges ahead. IPv4 exhaustion, the pool has depleted and, of course, the network address translation is a downside of these exhaustion and, of course, what you said, IPv6 is not here to stay.
And I would like to give the floor it Laura Kaplan from LACNIC, to share her experience and thoughts with us. Laura, you have the floor.
>> LAURA KAPLAN: Thank you. Good morning, everyone. There. My name is Laura Kaplan. I'm from LACNIC, that is the ARA, that I look for resources for Latin America and the Caribbean. I'm not going to speak about a specific case, and I don't want to repeat what Paul has explained, that is that IPv6 is here. It's now. The ARAs have been working and promoting the need to deploy IPv6 for the past more than ten years. We are working in this together as a group, promoting not only the need but also benefits that comes with the deployment of IPv6.
I would like to speak a little bit about the role that the governments can have the importance of pushing the ‑‑ the solicitation on to equipments that are ‑‑ that are available to connect not only IPv4 but also IPv6. We tend to get stuck with equipment or still invest in equipment that are not IPv6 ready. And we are now, between 40 and 60% of deployments. So we have not only a lot more to grow in ‑‑ which is the connecting devices but also more than 40% of our population.
So the need to grow is really huge.
So from the ARAs, we push the multi‑stakeholder way of working. So there is not only one actor that should take care of this. We believe that there is ‑‑ that there is a whole sectors that are involved, ISPs, academia, governments, also the technical community as our colleagues from Mexico and Peru, we are also very engaging in capacity building, and the fact that we were promoting this for the past ten years was not enough to get the message that the IPv6 is ‑‑ transition to IPv6 is the real solution, and it's the sustainable solution.
I also ‑‑ it's very important to work with not only the engineers or the technical that are related daily to this use, but also the people that are taking the decisions of investment in the companies. So capacity building is not always just to understand how to use or to turn to IPv6, but also to get the people that take that decision, to make the transition about the benefits.
And there's a lot of benefits. For example, the one ‑‑ the main benefit is that it's going to be a sustainable solution for getting ‑‑ for getting the population that is not connected in the Internet, and also to keep ‑‑ to accomplish the use of many more devices that the IoT is now in the need.
So I wanted to talk about the transferability, for example, that is also a benefit, it's safer. You can ‑‑ it's easier to ‑‑ to follow and to sustain the assignment of the ‑‑ of these resources. And the thing that the oil sectors are connected and are working in the same way, it's important to get all ‑‑ get on board. Not just as the country or the government, but as a different multi‑stakeholder group. So that's what I wanted to emphasize.
And I give the floor to the next one.
>> LEON SANCHEZ: Thank you very much, Laura from your intervention. What I take from it is you see government or LACNIC sees government as a key player in deployment, as wide adoption of IPv6 equipment could actually boost IPv6 deployment and also that one incentive that public policy could be looking at, is that the more IPv6 would deploy, the more population that is not yet connected could have actually access to the Internet.
I would like to expand a little bit on a topic that you touched and that's transferability of resources. You said that it was safer and ‑‑ would you mind expanding on why you see this as positive?
>> LAURA KAPLAN: As you know, the ARAs are the ones responsible for allocation of resources, so in the situations that we are having with IPv4, it's ‑‑ it's getting ‑‑ it's getting the bad news of IPv4 is ‑‑ is not the way to go. And turning to IPv6 is a more complete and it's more sustainable way to ‑‑ for the ARAs to really keep ‑‑ keep the register working as it has to be.
And this is going to are resolve a lot of problems of connectivity that we are maybe reaching now. So that's why transferability is one of IPv6 benefit.
>> LEON SANCHEZ: Thank you very much, Laura, for expanding on that.
Now, I would like to give the floor it Carolina Aguerre. Carolina.
>> CAROLINA AGUERRE: I would like to thank the organizers for setting up this panel, and for inviting me.
Firstly, I mean, the ‑‑ this panel is about IPv6 and IoT, and Paul just mentioned, I mean, that the IoT is just the Internet, and I totally agree, but what we have here is IoT becoming a big driver, I mean, connecting objects to the Internet, becoming like a major driver, a major incentive to deploy and develop IPv6.
And we just heard very interesting experiences in different regions and two Latin American countries on the major kind of incentives that governments have learned in the last years, on what they need ‑‑ I mean, the majority of incentives that they need to promote in their environment in order for IPv6 to be deployed. And continuing with Laura's invention, my intervention in this panel is briefly concentrated in also in looking at the role of governments, in the expansion of IoT and IPv6 together.
And one of them, first issues I would like to raise is something that has been considered in the literature and the best practices around the world recently is the role that German government took in the whole industrial ISP in the industry, 4.0, as a major concept where all the industries from the traditional sector are interconnected with this new ‑‑ with IPv6 and technologies that will interconnect objects and promote the use of artificial intelligence.
So here we have a very interesting role of governments in envisioning what kind of are ‑‑ the development for the productive sector where the development of the Internet and the interconnectivity is completely related with the future economic growth of any country and their industries, be they traditional or be they coming from the ICT sector.
The other thing is ‑‑ that we ‑‑ that we see is that governments also play a major role as agenda setters. So if governments don't buy‑in the relevance of IPv6 to enable IoT deployment, to enable smart cities, for example, to enable industry 4.0, then we ‑‑ we are still lacking a very strategic actor, player, in this field.
So the agenda setting and the role of agenda setters that the governments have to play here are essential and we have seen the work of AR As in the last decade in all parts of the world pushing the demand, I mean, trying to generate and foster the demand for IPv6, and we are still ‑‑ we still have an imbalance, regardless of the fact that those numbers are growing and that we have very interesting and positive experiences. There is still scope for growth in terms of having a demand and not just being pushing the demand constantly, which is something that we have seen and it's a strategic role that ARAs are playing.
The other point is that governments have to be adopters as well. I mean this whole thing about, oh, it's the private sector driving it, but in the public administration is not even itself aware that they have to be ‑‑ that the flagships of this development, that they have to have in their own public administration, IPv6 already and routers accepting IPv6 traffic, et cetera, it's just part of the whole idea of being a role model and adopting this major role.
And the other very significant roles that governments have to play, which some of our colleagues have already mentioned here is our training and capacity building, the development of start‑up ecosystems, I mean, that is essential and that is something that in the country where I live in Argentina, there is the ecosystem of this movement of entrepreneurs around the traditional ISP sector which want to engage with IoT, but they are asking for the government to develop clearer rules of the game in terms of what will be the ecosystem and the regulation for them if they embark in this kind of new business model for them, as well, which includes IoT.
So setting up this ecosystem for start‑ups is another interesting role for governments.
Of course standards ‑‑ standard setting efforts and literacy on these standards, the basic research ‑‑ promoting basic research on IPv6 is also something that governments and ministries of educational universities can also develop and think about maintaining an environment where competitiveness and openness is part of a founding principle of this ecosystem. You know, if we don't have openness, and competitiveness, then it will be difficult to think about interconnecting smaller environmental ‑‑ smaller networks into the larger network.
So these are the main points I wanted to share at this first stage.
>> LEON SANCHEZ: Thank you very much, Carolina. I take it the German experience was successful because the government was more of a facilitator, than an imposer of IPv6 deployment, and there's also cases in Argentina of start‑ups that are seeing lack of regulation as a chilling effect for ‑‑ for embarking on IoT enterprises. So this is ‑‑ one more time, an interesting mixture of how we see one sector of the population needing some regulation, while others are not really asking for regulation, but for facilitation.
So I would now like to hand the floor to Rajesh Chharia.
>> RAJESH CHHARIA: Good morning to all. India is always the lead starter in any field, but when we start, it's a possible. The same was into the mobile, initially we were struggling how to deploy the mobile and after a few years, we have surpassed 1 billion and now we are the second largest after China.
The same as in broadband, our target was 750 million by 2020, we have already 465 million to date, and we hope that 1 billion will be by 2020.
The same thing happened with IPv6. Initially we were struggling how to deploy, how to put and how to facilitate. Now as Paul mentioned we are the second largest in the world after Belgium. 51%.
And thanks to our new operators and our upcoming operators as well, when we have to meet the target, when the smart city project is, there IoT is there, everything is there, we require the IP. In the absence of IPv4, the only remaining solution is the IPv6. And we started adopting that.
Hardware manufacturers, software guys, has supported us a lot and given this opportunity, how to deploy. As Paul mentioned, it's one of the largest and we have serviced this IPv6 last year only, 2016, and right now, around 88% by the GO, 40% by the idea, and the rest 23%.
The good thing, what our government is able to do, Carolina, thanks for putting this thing for the government. Our government come up with the roadmap for IPv6. What they have done, they have mended it to the government department, so that you or the department has to be IPv6 enabled by the end of 2016, but somehow they have missed their target now 2017 is the final given date. And they have also requested and advised all the operators to be IPv6 enabled networked, whether the demand is coming from the customer side or not, but your network should be IPv6 enabled.
And at the same time, they have advised to the ministry of academia to put IPv6 as their curriculum into the are study course, so that the new youth who are coming for the job of other networking, they should know what is IPv6 and how to deploy that.
So this helps us in capacity building also.
To this multipurpose task taken by our government and the private sector, in the true multi‑stakeholder approach, had helped us in deploying IPv6 in a good way.
In 2012, India was awarded an ARA by APNIC, in the name of Irene and as a director of NICC I was there to see the best international ‑‑ or the best into the NRA, into the Asia Pacific region. I must thank Japan, because we got experience about the NAR, and he has helped us in such a way that India was able to build their own network of software of NAR successfully. And you can understand this is only due to you. You have guided us a lot!
And the same was with Taiwan, Dr. Qewe, he also arranged the visit of IPv6 in Taiwan which was used in day‑to‑day life in 2011 I'm talking of when the Taiwan is 2011, we are talking of the IPv6, we learn from them also.
Now the requirements are coming of the IPv6, when general public are housed, requiring the IP addressed for their home devices, where there is air conditioner, where there's a TV, where there is an oven, microwave oven. Slowly, slowly, the things is have come in in the right way, and I hope that after the deployment of the network limited by our government to connect 125,000 villages with the optical fiber to provide them the broadband services at their door step. We hope that very soon India will be number one in the IPv6 deployment, and we will be successful in our slogan of: Connect the unconnected.
So this is the story of IPv6 in India. IPv4 as I said is very important for the network.
A few years back, I think in 2008, '7, '8, a proposal has come into the APNIC, from the India side for allocation for minimizing the allocation of IPv4 so that the exhaustion should be increased for a time so that the newcomer or the start‑ups should get some flavor of the IPv4 because right now, IPv4, what we feel is the network and IPv6 slowly, slowly is going to take over this network.
Thank you very much.
>> LEON SANCHEZ: Thank you very much, Rajesh. This is very refreshing, I think as you have told us that an integrated ecosystem in a truly multi‑stakeholder way is successful in attaining the IPv6 deployment.
We see another example of the government, instead of map dating the private sector to deploy IPv6, they instead mandated the public sector to adopt IPv6. So we ‑‑ we can not deny that the governments played an important role in IPv6 deployment, but we need to find the formula, the right formula to have a fruitful participation of governments rather than a directive role or ‑‑ or steering role from governments, from what I heard from all of my colleagues here on the panel.
And it also alliances with the external players seems to have played a very important role in the deployment, like you mentioned the alliance with the ‑‑ with academia, which seem to have brought fruits to the table.
So do you want to comment?
>> RAJESH CHHARIA: You are right, government has played a good role, even our association, the ISPI, who I'm chairing. In the last seven or eight years, regularly every year and the main task of doing are this, and this year onward, we will do the INOG, we are going to the tier two city, so that the youth should be able to learn the networking, especially the IPv6 and security that is the necessity for the broadband penetration.
>> LEON SANCHEZ: Thank you very much, Rajesh.
Thank you very much. I think we have remote participants, but now we would like to break into groups so we can further discuss four main topics, and these main topics would be the main pillars of IoT development, the importance of IPv6 deployment for the proper development of IoT, that this will be one group, and I think that Carolina and Laura will be helping us in facilitating the discussion here.
And then we have the successful experiences for IPv6 deployment and the future of IPv4 addresses which I think Paul could help us in facilitating the discussion but I guess, Rajesh, you would be also very good in helping us with this and, of course, if you want to help yourself to this group.
But I remain with three ‑‑ three questions. It seems to me that this is some kind of egg and chicken situation, because you don't have IPv6 deployment, because the providers don't seem to have the incentives to invest in IPv6 equipment because they say they don't have the demand. So it's like we are stuck in that. And I also have the question about is it public policy to force IPv6 deployment, the answer, or is it rather public policy that will create market incentives for IPv6 deployment and set the right path to take.
I think that many of these issues have been put in the table by our panelists. So now, Kevon, would you like to break into groups so we can discuss? And we could discuss the topics for maybe 30 minutes and after that, I would invite you to give us your conclusions so we can share them to all the groups.
So let's break into groups.
Yes, Kevon?
(Off microphone comments).
>> LEON SANCHEZ: Okay.
(Off microphone comments.)
(Group discussion).
>> LEON SANCHEZ: Okay. So we have until 10:15 to discuss and after that, we will come back and share our conclusions.
>> Hello, those who are interested, in this corner, those with the v4 and v6 addressing issues, please relocate and join us over here.
Thank you.
(Group discussion).
>> LEON SANCHEZ: Okay, everyone. It's time for us to wrap up. So if you could please take your seats again and if you feel like you have still a lot of issues to discuss, of course, coffee is abundant!
(Laughter).
So feel free to continue your discussions.
So please, I would ask our panelists to wrap up the discussions and join us at the table so we can share the conclusions from each of the groups, with the wider audience.
Okay. So thank you, everyone, for a very fruitful discussion. I could see that some discussions were actually very heated. So that's a good sign.
I would now like to hand over the floor to our panelists to present the conclusions of the different groups and I would now go first with Laura Kaplan to give us a very brief wrap‑up on the discussions. Please.
>> LAURA KAPLAN: Okay. Thank you. Our group was debating about IoT and IPv6. We get for conclusions, the first one is that we need to approach in a multi‑stakeholder way, and there is not only ‑‑ there is not responsibility for only one actor to get the IPv6 deployment, but all the sectors need to be engaged.
The second one is the importance of training, and training not just for engineers. We have a table from ‑‑ people from different regions and we notice that there is a need for engineers in some regions, but also the need to train the developers and also the people that are making the decisions of investment in the ISPs and also inside the governments.
The further conclusion is about snowball kind of process, in which when once started, they get all involved and push the other actors to get engaged, and for one is about to make a business case to convince mostly ISPs and governments to switch and to deploy IPv6 and to make it about the growing of the IoT industry.
So make the business case about the need to get on board with the IoT. So those were our conclusions. Thank you very much.
There very much for the discussion. It was a very interesting and participating table.
>> LEON SANCHEZ: Thank you, Laura for presenting us these conclusions. Now we will hand it over to Paul for other group's conclusions.
>> PAUL WILSON: Thank you very much. We had a very diverse group, considering what are the drivers for IPv4 to IPv6 transition. It's a really interesting group. We had people from almost all stakeholders ‑‑ stakeholder groups. So I think it was a very multi‑stakeholder discussion and really showed there are a lot of diverse perspectives on this challenge. I don't think we had conflicts of opinion at all, but we definitely had some very different and important views. So we started off, we heard first about as a very good example, a meeting recently, a government‑sponsored meeting in Colombia where the government is very interested in digitization, and has seen IPv6 as a priority, and yet at the same time recently the tax authority implemented a service ‑‑ a brand new service which is not IPv6 compliant and it was an scam of coherency in government and some information sharing about the priorities and mandates.
Moving on from there, the question of mandates that can be introduced by governments very powerfully by government procurement. In some cases we had governments requiring that all equipment, all ICT equipment be by some measure IPv6 compliant. That, according to one of our members from a large ISP is actually not such a challenge for the ISPs because, in fact, most new equipment that's available these days, the majority is IPv6 compliant anyway.
So I think ‑‑ I think it's a question there about whether government mandates are actually realistic or not, whether they are meaningful or not, because, of course, an unrealistic mandate that no one can meet is an issue and, in fact, we mentioned that, for instance, years ‑‑ many years ago, the Japanese had tax incentives for IPv6 deployment, which actually didn't produce any result.
And I think the question of implementability is very important.
So from Kenya, there was an interesting comparison from analog to digital transition.
It started with a technical approach. It wasn't until they shifted to a policy approach that it really took off and helped Kenya to become the first country in Africa to complete that transition on time. So they, for instance, had a tax‑free incentives on digital ‑‑ or tax‑free status on importation of digital TV products as one example there.
We heard from the Caribbean about the current priority and recovery from hurricanes and a lot of damage that was done there and the need, again, for incorporating IPv6 into rebuilding which to me reminds me of the SDG ‑‑ the big one SDG goal, that when you are digging a pit or a trench of any kind, you put cables in at the time. So it could be a water pipe, but you put cables in that pipe, in a one dig policy.
So I suppose in a infrastructure, you really shouldn't be rolling out infrastructure without IPv6 capability being put in there from the start. And as we heard, the equipment is available to actually do that. So it is a realistic ‑‑ realistic goal.
IoT was seen as the other good excuse as it was ‑‑ as it was described for putting priority on IPv6. So that at the policy level seems to be ‑‑ seems to be another incentive or driver for ‑‑ for transition.
I think that was ‑‑ I mean it was a wide ranging discussion. It was very interesting. I wish we could have had another half an hour at least, but if we have time, maybe some other contributors would like to have some particular data points to add. But thanks to all the participants, it was very interesting.
>> LEON SANCHEZ: Thank you very much, Paul, for presenting us these conclusions.
I would like to thank all of our panelists at this point, and if there's anyone who would like to add anything to this session.
Yes, Rosa, please.
>> ROSA DELGADO: Yes. The last thing I would like to say is I think we need champions in every country to promote IPv6 IoT. I think if we had the president of a country or the president of the Congress or the president of the largest company in every country talking all the time about these issues, I think it would be very, very good for, you know, the movement, for the development. I think we need champions, as you know in all things.
The other thing I wanted to say very quickly is Paul mentioned about every new application should be on IPv6, but I think all the legacy as well, which I tried to identify in Peru, at least, if there's some legacy system that we could move directly from legacy into IPv6, I think is the two incentives I wanted us to say.
Thank you.
>> LEON SANCHEZ: Thank you very much, Rosa. Anyone else wants to add anything?
Okay. So thank you very much, everyone, for attending this workshop. I think we made a different format than the usual workshop here at the IGF, but I think it was also fruitful for us to discuss, you know, more open and intimate way our thoughts. So thank you very much. Thank you very much for the ‑‑ to the organizers, ISP and LACNIC. We are now adjourned.
Thank you.
(Applause).