At Mobile World Congress 2025, Developing Telecoms spoke with IPv6 Forum President Latif Ladid to discuss IPv6 and Net 5.5G development, and their impact on global digitization in the AI era.
Deployment of IPv6 has been ongoing for the past 25 years, and has reached around 60% penetration worldwide. China leads the way with 80% penetration, around 800 million users, followed by India, with 425 million, which is about 50% of the internet user population.
The next step is to migrate entirely to IPv6, leaving behind IPv4. Countries such as the US are moving to IPv6 for government networks, but the biggest deployers are primarily mobile operators, because they need IP addresses for mobile devices. The IPv6 Forum recruits teams from each country where it operates to promote this migration to governments and industry, and it has seen significant success, with uptake in over 150 countries.
“We were looking for the first scale application. I went to see the head of ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) who was at the same time the chairman of the 3GPP, Karl Heinz Rosenbrock, and explained to him that 3G was designed only for IMS, which means that only the operators will have services, nevertheless they will not be connected to the internet. At that time, there were already half a billion people using the internet, and they were the top [business] people on the planet – if [3GPP] didn’t get these guys to use 3G, the whole thing would be useless. As soon as we adopted it, Apple launched the iPhone, kicking off the mobile wireless revolution”.
5G was just an access technology - it's not a backbone technology, and sustaining new applications like AI, IoT, and blockchain requires robust backbone data centres and access to the end users. AI requires a lot of data processing, and the Wireless Broadband Association came up with the innovative idea of creating generations akin to 4G/5G by augmenting and upgrading the backbone data centres, from four users to ten, from 1GB to 10GB data centres. The current generation is Net 5.5G, and this definition makes it easier to understand for governments and regulators – they can check whether they’re up to date on technologies, whether they’re teaching engineers or hiring the right experts to sustain this. There are plenty of efforts in this field such as smart cities, but the communication behind it is not so well-defined.
The IPv6 Forum is creating a roadmap and best practices for this upcoming sector in partnership with WBBA in June 2024, with a particular focus on developing countries, many of which are not up to date. Operators that have deployed Net 5.5G such as Airtel in Africa are using Segment Routing v6 (SRv6), which helps smaller operators in markets with one particularly dominant player, enabling them to break out into neighbouring markets.
The biggest operators – whether in West Africa, south Africa or in East Africa – are present in five or six countries, and they are deploying IPv6 using SRv6, because they want to manage their networks across countries so they can cross end to end from one network to the other one, making management and maintenance a lot simpler. This is where the merger of this upgraded backbone with IPv6 is fundamental; it’s like a new killer application for IPv6, not only the address space or auto configuration or end to end security, but also for managing very large networks.
Ladid notes that the forum writes best practices for each country it visits – recently, this list has included Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Morocco as well as most Middle Eastern countries. In most of the countries - especially where industry is not strong enough - the regulators are fighting just to survive. Getting the regulator and government on board is essential; the Forum explains how Ipv6 can help advance the country in order to attract overseas investment.
“People are not going to invest money in a country that doesn't have any infrastructure, so infrastructure has become a solid selling point for most of the countries. New technologies are long term, so you have to protect your investment, you have to be up to spec, and be ready for new applications. But most of the top management, they don't care about these things because they don't understand them. They don't have the vision for them. So that's why you have more kind of monopoly in terms of applications.”
Ladid describes the Forum’s work as voluntary, with the goal of connecting the unconnected. He notes that around 2 billion people worldwide still have no internet access, with the majority in developing nations. Education is a huge issue, particularly in light of ongoing automation – AI will have an impact on intellectual jobs, but it will not replace them – it will be used to enhance, so having access to knowledge upfront means people will be better positioned to do their jobs and remain in employment. He argues that the escalating cybersecurity issues and proliferation of online deepfakes and misinformation are an argument for implementing blockchain globally as a way of verifying online information. Data will be signed and timestamped so that it is immutable; whoever it’s accessed by, including AI, it will be verifiable as the original. Ladid notes that most government networks are easily hackable, and this has led to the proliferation of ransomware, which drains billions from companies each year as they pay to make the issue go away.
“Our infrastructure is very fragile; when I call you, you are the only one to pick up the phone. This is not the case today with the internet, because we're not using IP addresses that are routable, where you have your own IP address, and I have my own. When I call you, I can VPN the call between us - nobody can access this. With IPv6, everyone can have millions of IP addresses. You can do different transactions, use different features, with different either for business or for private or sales for and you can also save all of these transactions on different IP addresses, and nobody can access them except you.”
This open-source concept enables a huge amount, but it can be misused and so must be secured early to pre-empt any damage. To this end, the IPv6 Forum is collaborating with different standard bodies, including the ITFC, ITU and W3C, but it’s equally important to educate the governments and the regulators. Currently, 60% of IPv6 deployments are happening in Asia. The numbers are there – deploying a network for 400 million people requires a lot of investment. This isn’t feasible in Europe or the US – it would be too expensive for the return. Ladid argues that governments should take progressive steps here – acknowledging that consumers will not pay more for 5G, and therefore reducing the amount that they charge operators to acquire spectrum – otherwise IPv6 adoption will stall at around 50%. Cloud computing can provide a workaround, enabling SMEs to adopt IPv6 without having to do anything. He notes that companies such as CloudFlare can use routers to website services with IPv6 even if there are no IPv6 networks in the country – he notes that this approach is already common across Africa, with the address coming from Europe or the US. However, this will not stop the backbone upgrade – Ladid estimates that in around five years, there will be 100% deployment of IPv6, making it possible to leave IPv4 behind.
Governments are leading the way in adoption of IPv6 – predominantly the US and China. The extensive nationalisation in China has enabled funding for buildouts of ambitious infrastructure projects, including rail and water infrastructure, but governments also play a significant role in developing countries with flatter economies – if deployment isn’t led by industry, governments make the decisions on building infrastructure and promoting technologies. Ladid notes that in much of West Africa and Central Asia, the pace of development is remarkable, with the latest technologies already available and in deployment. Governments have become sensitive to this, and are seeking to develop their countries rather than playing catch-up to European markets.
