Alejandro Acosta and the IPv4 Route with an IPv6 Next Hop

Alejandro Acosta Put the IPv6 Next Hop Under a Microscope

Why it matters

A LACNIC classroom plan turned a deceptively odd routing sentence into BGP sessions, captured packets and a question engineers could actually test.

Sofia Ren3 November 2026Reading Time 2 minLast update: 3 November 2026

Alejandro Acosta; face based on LACNIC’s named photograph, with an imagined lab behind him.

Summary

LACNIC assigned Alejandro Acosta two parts of its 2023 IPv6-only tutorial: NAT64/DNS64 and IPv4-prefix routing across an IPv6-only network using RFC 8950.
His proposed demonstration used BGP sessions between devices and Wireshark captures; the later 2026 LACNIC 45 plan moved toward an IPv6-mostly test network.

An IPv4 route riding toward an IPv6 next hop sounds like the sort of sentence that makes a router ask for a second coffee. Alejandro Acosta wanted engineers to see the packets instead. In LACNIC’s March 2023 course preview, he described a live exercise with BGP sessions between devices and Wireshark captures. The class was planned for May 8 in Mérida. A protocol name would become something a room could interrogate.

The teaching plan assigned him two different jobs. NAT64/DNS64 would show how an IPv6-side client reaches an IPv4-side service through translation. A separate exercise would advertise IPv4 prefixes across an IPv6-only network using BGP, without tunnels, MPLS or NAT in that routing mechanism. RFC 8950 supplies the precise technical hinge: IPv4 reachability information can carry an IPv6 next hop when peers negotiate the relevant capability. Putting the two exercises side by side invited students to separate application access from route distribution.

Acosta was part of a three-person bill. Uesley Correa was assigned SIIT-DC; José Cotúa was to demonstrate IPv6 provisioning for 10GPON. Their topics met at a practical boundary: a network can change its transport without making every client, service or access line change in the same instant. A classroom that shows the mechanisms separately gives operators a chance to ask where each one belongs.

By LACNIC’s 2026 tutorial preview, the emphasis had shifted toward “IPv6 mostly.” Acosta and Cotúa were listed as guides for a test network, configuration exercises and a take-home guide. The move from a pure-only label to a mixed operational setting is telling. Acosta’s LACNIC author profile identifies him as its research and development coordinator; here the interesting role is the instructor who insists that an architectural claim survive a packet capture.