IPV4 Exhaustion and IPv6 Adoption in Latin America

IPv4 Exhaustion in Latin America

As announced by the Registry of Internet Addresses for Latin America and the Caribbean (LACNIC) through an official statement, as of June 10, 2014, Latin America unquestionably began the phase of exhaustion of the old technology of the Internet (IPv4) because of the slow deployment of the IPv6 protocol.

IPv6 Adoption in Latin America

In fact, there was a time when various organizations warned of IPv4 exhaustion and warned that we should prepare for the change to the new IPv6 protocol and its 128-bit addresses. That didn't do much good, and today IPv6 address support is just over 25% and we may never see a full migration to this IP address space.

The issue with IPv6 is that it was designed without compatibility for the old version, IPv4. In this case, you can only use one or the other. Or, as it has ended up happening, you use both at the same time to migrate from one to the other when IPv4 was useless. The problem doing this is that this has not happened and could be far from happening, IPv4 addresses are still essential for the Internet and can’t be fully replaced so far, especially considering the lower development of the region in technology.

According to official information from LACNIC, the organization has assigned 189.3 million IPv4 addresses to more than 11,200 organizations and companies in Latin America and the Caribbean by 2021. LACNIC continues to encourage corporations to accelerate the deployment of IPv6 in their networks to accelerate the growth of the Internet in the region.

For example, countries like Brazil and Mexico have an IPv6 adoption level of 38% to date, according to Google's IPv6 statistics. On the other hand, South American countries such as Peru, Ecuador, Paraguay, Argentina, and Bolivia have an IPv6 adoption level of 21%, 27%, 20%, 10%, and 15%, respectively. While the majority of Central American countries, Chile and Venezuela, have an almost zero IPv6 adoption with less than 2% each.

According to a study carried out by LACNIC in recent years, the reasons why Internet Service Providers do not completely migrate to IPv6 technology are because the current infrastructure presents problems for this, the necessary investment is not justifiable by the demand and they still have IPv4 addresses available. The study also notes that some ISPs foresee difficulties in the deployment of IPv6 and that they may still employ measures to extend the life of IPv4.

Among these intermediate measures is the sharing of addresses, that is, that two or more users have the same assigned IP, something that with IPv6 would not happen due to the high number of addresses it can grant, so each device would have its own.

This practice of sharing the IPs used by so-called CGNATs deteriorates the quality of the user's Internet because certain applications do not work or do so slowly when using this technique. The low deployment of IPv6 in Latin America and the Caribbean can also affect the advancement of device interconnection, known as the Internet of Things.

Conclusion

The Latin American Region is still well behind the ideal level of IPv6 technology adoption, given its economic and social restrictions. Therefore, IPv4 addresses seem to remain as the main technology of the Internet in the region for a very, very long time.

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