[governance] FW: <incom> Mobile Internet take-up is speeding the take-up of IPv6 in Africa

[Michael Gurstein]

This may be of interest...

MG

-----Original Message-----
From: incom-l-bounces at incommunicado.info
[mailto:incom-l-bounces at incommunicado.info] On Behalf Of Soenke Zehle
Sent: May 24, 2008 4:32 AM
To: incom
Subject: <incom> Mobile Internet take-up is speeding the take-up of IPv6 in
Africa


http://www.afrinic.net/meeting/afrinic-8/index.htm
http://www.balancingact-africa.com
Issue no 406
22nd May 2008

Mobile Internet take-up is speeding the take-up of IPv6 in Africa

A few years ago Africa's new Internet Numbers Registry, AfriNIC looked 
more of a dream and a prayer than a reality. But the take-up of IPv4 
Internet addresses, which has almost reached 85% of those allocated, has 
shown that it can do its job and do it well. It's now experiencing a 
second wave of growth as mobile companies buy IPv6 addresses to keep up 
with the expansion of mobile data services. Russell Southwood spoke to 
AfriNIC's CEO Adiel Akplogan about what it all means.

The process of preparing for the transition to IPv6 started in December 
2005 when AfriNIC ran its first training course on the subject as part 
of its annual meeting. Back then, its adoption may have seemed less 
pressing and indeed maybe slightly irrelevant for Africa. But the 
dramatic take-up of AfriNIC's IPv4 allocation has made this "it's not 
for Africa" position dangerously outdated.

Although AfriNIC's latest study predicts that IPv4 addresses will run 
out in 2012, the pressure to consider IPv6 addresses as an alternative 
will grow stronger as time goes by. For since AfriNIC started, there has 
been a 100% growth in IPv4 allocations and this has increased 
dramatically again with the entry of 3G mobile data services.

Overall, AfriNIC has allocated 16 million addresses, which means that 
somewhere out there on the continent there are 16 million devices that 
need an IP address to operate. These could be anything from a PC to a 
printer or a mobile phone. Last year it allocated 5 million addresses 
and a significant proportion of these were from mobile operators moving 
from private to public IPv4 addresses to meet data service demand.

In three years time, it projects that the number of addresses allocated 
will have doubled to approximately 32 million. The tantalising but 
slightly elusive calculation is to wonder how many devices/addresses 
there are on average per person because out of that guesstimate it would 
be possible to say roughly how many people had access to an Internet 
ready device of some sort.

In 2005 there were only four allocations of IPv6 addresses but now there 
are nearly 60 allocations so the transition point may well get closer as 
mobile companies transition first to IPv4 addresses (exhausting the 
existing allocation more quickly than the 2012 prediction) and switch to 
IPv6. As Adiel Akplogan notes:" This runs to billions of addresses." 
AfriNIC is looking to make sure that IPv6 addresses are deployed in each 
African country.

So what's so good about IPv6? The cynics always believe that upgrades 
simply fiddle with what was once perfectly adequate and need whole new 
generations of fiddling to get them right. Akplogan says this will not 
be the case as IPv6 has drawn heavily on the experience of IPv4 and it 
contains features that are much easier to access, things that existed in 
IPv4 but which were not really necessarily widely used.

And those features? Akplogan said:"Security is embedded in IPv6 and it's 
possible to encrypt communications and there will be the development of 
apps around that as it will be possible to safely encypt on the fly."

But the key draw in terms of how Africa's Internet markets are 
developing is IPv6 also has mobility embedded in it:"We'll reach a point 
where IP addresses will become our identity. You can reach someone on 
any device on the same IP addresses."

"A number of organisations have recognized that these advantages are 
relevant to Africa and have imposed a rule that all new equipment is 
IPv6-ready."
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