Hello all.

In November 2018 during the ZAPF (South African Peering Forum) meeting in Cape Town, 3 major African ISP's announced that they would enable RPKI-based ROV (Route Origin Validation), including dropping Invalid routes as part of efforts to improve Internet routing security, on the 1st April, 2019.

On the 1st of April, Workonline Communications (AS37271) enabled ROV and began dropping Invalid routes. This applies to all eBGP sessions, both IPv4 and IPv6.

On the 5th of April, SEACOM (AS37100) enabled ROV and began dropping Invalid routes. This applies to eBGP sessions with public peers, private peers and transit providers, both for IPv4 and IPv6. eBGP sessions toward downstream customers will follow in 3 months time.

Implementation at the third ISP has yet to be completed. We are sure they will communicate with the community when they are ready to do so.

Please note that for the legal reasons previously discussed in various fora, neither Workonline nor SEACOM are utilising the ARIN TAL. As a result, any routes covered only by a ROA issued under the ARIN TAL will fall back to a status of Not Found. Unfortunately, this means that ARIN members will not see any improved routing security for their prefixes on our networks until this is resolved.

We will each re-evaluate this decision if and when ARIN's policy changes. We are hopeful that this will happen sooner rather than later.

If you interconnect with either of us and believe that you are experiencing any routing issues potentially related to this new policy, please feel free to reach out to either:

    - noc@workonline.africa

    - peering@seacom.mu

Workonline Communications and SEACOM hope that this move encourages the rest of the ISP community around the world to ramp up their deployment of RPKI ROV and begin dropping Invalid routes. We appreciate the work that AT&T and others have carried out in the same vein.

In the mean time, we are happy to answer any questions you may have about our deployments.

Thanks,

Mark Tinka (SEACOM) & Ben Maddison (Workonline Communications).