State of IPv6 in Serbia

Auto-generated narrative from the daily measurement battery.

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This report is about IPv6 only. No measurements, classifications, or conclusions on this page concern IPv4. Legacy IPv4 is not in scope - we do not test it, we do not compare against it, and we do not draw conclusions about its state. Every number, every percentage, every “works / doesn’t work” verdict here refers exclusively to IPv6.

AS inventory

Serbia has 162 autonomous systems registered with the RIR. Of those, 161 (99 %) currently announce at least one IPv4 prefix to the global routing table, and 31 (19 %) currently announce at least one IPv6 prefix. That means 19 % of the IPv4-active ASes have followed through and turned on IPv6.

Operators - PA (Provider Aggregatable) holders

PA-holding ASes are LIRs with their own RIR allocation - they are the operators running parts of Serbia’s internet (transits, ISPs, content networks with infrastructure of their own). Serbia has 108 PA-holding operator ASes registered with the RIR. Of those, 108 (100 %) announce IPv4 today and 23 (21 %) announce IPv6.

108
PA operators (total)
108
PA + IPv4 (100 %)
23
PA + IPv6 (21 %)

End-sites - PI (Provider Independent) holders

PI-holding ASes hold address space directly from the RIR for their own use - typically enterprises, content sites running their own AS for routing diversity, government / academic single-site deployments. They’re not “operators” in the LIR sense, but they show up in BGP and their v6 readiness still matters. Serbia has 48 PI-holding end-site ASes. Of those, 47 (98 %) announce IPv4 and 2 (4 %) announce IPv6.

48
PI end-sites (total)
47
PI + IPv4 (98 %)
2
PI + IPv6 (4 %)

Country totals: 162 routed ASes / 161 announce IPv4 / 31 announce IPv6. 6 ASes are unclassified (RIPE inet*num lookup didn’t return a clear status). PA / PI counts above include the “mixed” bucket on the PA side since a mixed AS holds at least one PA prefix and operationally functions as an LIR.

Executive summary

We measure how 31 Serbian autonomous systems that announce 74 IPv6 prefix(es) treat ICMPv6 in practice - Echo, Type 2 (Packet Too Big), Time-Exceeded - using three ICMPv6 vantage points and a 12-node global yarrp mesh, plus the SOX route-server BGP table as ground truth. Generated 2026-05-30 11:34 UTC.

18
ASes classified open
1
ping ok / 1500B fails
0
unreachable / blocked / no host
14
RFC 4890 ✓ proven
5
RFC 4890 ✗ proven
11
SRB ASes peering at SOX

Adoption

According to RIPEstat, 31 ASes registered to Serbia announce at least one IPv6 prefix to the global routing table, advertising 74 distinct prefixes between them. The 12-vantage-point mesh observed 66 distinct ASes (Serbian + foreign transits) and 109 AS-AS adjacencies along paths into Serbia.

ICMPv6 behaviour at the destination

Each AS gets a single classification per vantage point by combining the small Echo, the 1500-byte Echo with DF set, traceroute reachability, and a TCP liveness check. Aggregated across all 3 vantage points, the SRB population looks like this:

The open bucket means every vantage point received Echo Replies for both small and 1500-byte probes; this is what every SRB network should look like. echo_only means small ping passed but 1500-byte packets did not - usually either a path-MTU constraint downstream of us, or a real ICMPv6 Type 2 (Packet Too Big) filter en route. The two unreachable buckets cover ASes whose AS edge filters all incoming ICMPv6.

Weekly-probe schedule: 12 of SRB’s 43 IPv6-announcing ASes are on a 6-day probe cycle today because they’ve produced a stably-unreachable / no-host result for 14+ consecutive daily runs. Today’s numbers reflect the 31 ASes probed this run; the skipped 12 are re-tested approximately weekly. (Tuneable in scripts/19_update_skip_list.py -- raise STREAK_TO_SKIP to probe more aggressively, lower WEEKLY_PROBE_DAYS to re-test sooner.)

RFC 4890 compliance (active Type 2 test)

RFC 4890 gives operators the option to drop ICMPv6 Echo at the firewall, but says Type 2 (Packet Too Big) must remain permitted end-to-end - otherwise PMTUD is broken and large flows hang silently. We test this directly: for every reachable AS we open an active flow (TCP/53 DNS, TCP/443 TLS, ICMPv6 Echo, or HTTP/80 - whichever applies), forge an ICMPv6 Type 2 with MTU=1280, and observe whether the destination acts on it.

Active-test method breakdown across all targets: no_echo = 66, honored = 46, not_honored = 40, partial = 1.

SOX peering

The Serbian Open eXchange (SOX) currently has 42 peering members reachable via its route servers. Of those, 11 are Serbian-registered ASes; the rest are international peers that serve Serbian traffic via SOX (common examples: Hurricane Electric, Cloudflare, PCH).

Top SOX-internal transit relationships (BGP-truth)

For the full members list with live route-server session state, see the dedicated SOX page.

Path-MTU and Type 2 evidence

The active Type 2 test produced definitive verdicts for 23 unique destination IP addresses across vantage points.

Global BGP visibility (RIPE RIS)

For every SRB prefix we asked all RIPE RIS collectors what AS-paths they currently see. That gives us each AS' direct upstream(s) according to the global BGP table.

RPKI & ASPA

RPKI ROAs cryptographically bind a prefix to its origin AS, so route-leaks and hijacks of that prefix can be filtered. We validate every announced SRB IPv6 prefix against the local Routinator (rpki-lju.6connect.com).

Of 31 SRB ASes announcing IPv6:

Per prefix: 68 valid, 0 invalid, 6 not-found (of 74 total).

Top unsigned ASes (no ROAs)

ASPA (Autonomous System Provider Authorization)

ASPA is a much newer (RFC 9774) RPKI object: it lets a customer AS list which upstream providers may legitimately propagate routes from it. Routes from that AS arriving via any other path are then ASPA-invalid.

1 of 31 SRB ASes have published an ASPA record:

Path asymmetry

For every SRB AS we compared where our outgoing traffic enters their network (the AS just upstream of them on traceroute paths from any of our 14 vantage points) to which AS the global BGP table says is their direct upstream (RIS view). When these disagree, the network is multi-homed and traffic in vs. out takes different paths - normal in well-peered networks but worth surfacing.

15 SRB ASes flagged as asymmetric this run. Most asymmetric examples (low symmetry score):

Bottom line

This report is regenerated daily at 12:00 Europe/Belgrade from data/analyzed.json, data/six_lg.json, data/global_topology.json, data/ris_bgp.json, data/asymmetry.json and data/type2_results_<vantage>.json. The text is deterministic - no manual editorial pass.