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Geneva, Switzerland, 12 May 2014 – The International Telecommunication Union today signed a letter of intent with the African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC) on the promotion of IPv6. The letter of intent seeks to establish a high-level framework of cooperation to carry out a number of activities to improve the implementation of IPv6, through the provision of technical assistance to African countries.

“Areas of cooperation include, among others, the development and delivery of joint capacity-building programmes and knowledge sharing,” said Mr Brahima Sanou, Director of the Telecommunications Development Bureau (BDT). “Accelerating the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is an important matter for ITU Member States and Sector Members.”

“Currently, 99.4 per cent of physical objects that may one day be part of the “Internet of Things” are still unconnected,” explained Mr Sanou. “Moreover, large areas of the world remain unserved or under-served by Internet connections.   One of the key technologies that can enable progress in Internet connectivity is IPv6. IPv6 will ensure better and increased connectivity, better access to resources and to knowledge.”

"The future of the Internet is on IPv6 and Africa cannot afford to be left behind," said Mr Adiel Akplogan, AFRINIC Chief Executive Officer. "This agreement is an important milestone in AFRINIC's cooperation with ITU. As the Internet is becoming more and more critical to our emerging economies, it is equally critical for our operators, public or private, to safeguard the Internet’s future by building networks that are scalable, resilient and ready to run with the new version of the protocol - IPv6. This is the only way that we can ensure open access and a permission- less innovation capability for the millions of future Internet users coming from our region.”

Since its inception AFRINIC has invested heavily in efforts in capacity building efforts. This investment is meant to provide the knowledge and skills necessary to manage the Internet in the African and Indian Ocean region. Conducted under the ambit of capacity building, the programme is supported by AFRINIC’s avowed mission “to support Internet Technology usage and development across the continent”. This means that AFRINIC has made training a central part of its activities. Since 2005 AFRINIC has held almost 100 trainings and workshops in 50 countries around Africa, training more than 2 000 Engineers.

Every device connected to the Internet is identified by a unique IP address, used to route the data packets globally across the net. The current addressing system, called IP version 4, or IPv4 was deployed in 1983. However, the depletion of IPv4 addresses has been a concern since the late 1980s, when the Internet started to experience dramatic growth. IPv6 was developed to solve the crisis of IPv4 exhaustion.

Future growth of the Internet will require IPv6, with its extremely large address space — it exceeds 340 trillion, trillion, trillion (or 340 undecillion addresses). To give a more tangible idea of the scale, some have compared the number of available IPv6 addresses to the number of grains of sand on the planet.

The BDT Director and the Director of the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB) have initiated a joint project to help developing countries. The two Directors have also established a website that provides information about global activities being undertaken by relevant entities in the Internet community, for example, RIRs, local Internet registries, operator groups, and the Internet Society (ISOC).

The letter of intent was signed by Mr Brahima Sanou and Mr Adiel Akplogan at ITU Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Read the full Letter of Intent.

 

About AFRINIC

AFRINIC is the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for Africa and is responsible for the distribution and management of Internet number resources (IPv4, IPv6 and ASNs) throughout the African region. AFRINIC’s mission is to provide professional and efficient distribution of Internet number resources to the African Internet community and to support Internet technology usage and development across the continent. Read more on AFRINIC  and free training courses and our awareness and knowledge programmes in Africa on af6tf and 6spots websites.

 

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ARIN, the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for North America, announced on 23 April 2014 that it had entered phase 4 of its IPv4 Countdown Plan, meaning that it is now assigning space from the last /8 of IPv4 address space and that depletion of its pool is imminent.

APNIC exhausted its supply of IPv4 address space back in 2011 and the RIPE NCC followed quickly in 2012.  LACNIC recently announced that it expects its IPv4 pool to be depleted sometime in the first half of 2014. The announcement by ARIN now means that AFRINIC is the only RIR with a non-critically low supply of IPv4 address space.

CEO Adiel Akplogan says, “This, however, does not mean we can be complacent about our supply of IPv4 address space. Consumption levels in the region are increasing rapidly – it is no coincidence that four of the largest IPv4 allocations made worldwide in 2013 were to African nations: Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria and Seychelles. Africa also has one of the world’s highest penetrations of mobile Internet users, all of whom need IP addresses to get online, and this user-base is growing fast 

We simply cannot afford to think that IPv4 exhaustion is something that affects other regions. In the near future, it is inevitable that AFRINIC will become the only region where, with correct justification, significant amounts of IPv4 address space can be obtained. We expect this to lead to a sharp increase in requests and our Member Services Team is preparing accordingly for this.”

In addition, AFRINIC also expects increased scrutiny of its allocation processes and procedures, especially in the grey-area of non-policy compliant requests. These issues include resources being requested for offshore companies, organisations with entire customer bases outside of AFRINIC’s service region and emerging technologies making it difficult to identify whether a prospective member is an LIR or an End User.

“We encourage the community to contribute to discussions on the Policy Discussion Mailing list and, during the AFRINIC Meetings, to voice their opinion on how AFRINIC should handle all aspects of Internet number resource allocation policies,” says Akplogan. “It is up to the community to define how we move forward at this crucial point in the history of the Internet and we look forward to your input.” 

As the supply of IPv4 address space continues to dwindle, more and more new connections will be made over IPv6 as opposed to IPv4. The future of the Internet will be over IPv6 and, unless African networks and businesses also transition, they risk becoming isolated from the global Internet. As the rest of the world moves to IPv6, Africa also has to make sure its networks, services and content are IPv6 ready to remain a global player.

“As we move into a future where large quantities of IPv4 address space will be unobtainable in many parts of the world, I take this opportunity to reiterate the message that IPv6 deployment cannot wait: you need to ensure that your networks, devices and content are IPv6 ready or enabled sooner rather than later,” concludes Akplogan.

AFRINIC has been leading the effort in the region to promote and support IPv6 deployment since 2005 through outreach, education, free training courses and provision of an IPv6 test bed. Find out more about our IPv6 Programme. 

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