Government must lead on internet numbers switchover

What you need to know:

  • First and foremost, rest assured that the internet will continue functioning after this final block of addresses is depleted.
  • April 3 of last month was Africa’s turn to enter this last lap in as far as depleting the available pool of IP version 4 Internet resources is concerned.

  • There must be deliberate and concerted effort at national level to ensure that both private and public sector organisations transition to the new internet platform.

Five weeks ago, on April 3, something significant took place quietly across the African continent. 

The pool of unique numbers required to connect every device to the Internet entered its exhaustion phase. This means the last block of these unique numbers, known as Internet Protocol Numbers (IP Numbers) had begun to be distributed to telecommunications operators and ISPs across the continent.

Afrinic, the body charged with managing and distributing these IP numbers in Africa was the last of the five bodies mandated by ICANN to enter this exhaustion phase. So what does all this mean for Africa and for Kenya in particular?

First and foremost, rest assured that the Internet will continue functioning after this final block of addresses is depleted.

This is because the next generation platform, known as Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), developed 20 years ago, has been waiting to take over whenever IPv4 gets exhausted.

Case studies exist across the globe, since this exhaustion moment has been occurring sequentially over the past five years as different continents exhausted their IP version 4 address space.

APNIC, for Asia and the Pacific, was the first one to exhaust its IPv4 number space, followed by ARIN, for the US and Canada, RIPE for Europe and Middle East and more recently LACNIC, for Latin America.

April 3 was Africa’s turn to enter this last lap. This milestone is of global significance because it signals the end of an era the era of IP version 4, the original numbering platform for the Internet since its inception.

ALLOCATED RESTRICTIVELY

In practical terms, the exhaustion period means that organisations and businesses wishing to join the Internet or extend their network infrastructure will get limited IP address space because the remaining numbers will be allocated restrictively.

In another two to three years, depending on consumption rates, Africa and the whole world will no longer have any of the old-generation IPv4 address space to be distributed.

This means current and future organisations and enterprises must begin to adopt and use the next generation Internet protocol platform, IPv6, or be excluded from the Internet economy.

Organisations that are currently using the old IPv4 platform will stay connected to the Internet since the new and old platforms can coexist and interoperate.

TWO PLATFORMS IN PARALLEL

However, it is also true that some organisations' websites, particularly in developed countries, may opt to configure their services to run purely on the new IPv6 platforms, which will mean that communications with anyone still running on the old IPv4 network platforms will be discontinued.

Such a business decision may be informed by the need to cut costs by deliberately not supporting or running the two platforms in parallel.

This potentially means that a large section of the African networks that would not have transitioned to the new IPv6 platform may not communicate with their counterparts in the developed economies.

In such cases, African networks must either upgrade to the new-generation IPv6 platform or be isolated and confined to communicating within the continent.

EARLY DEATH

The need to transition and adopt IPv6 within our networks has never been so urgent, particularly after we have now turned the corner and started depleting our last block of IPv4 addresses.

There must be deliberate and concerted efforts at the national level to ensure that both private and public sector organisations transition to the new Internet platform.

This is particularly true when we consider that IPv6 deployment in Africa is currently very low, with South Africa the leading adopter, consuming 28 per cent of all the IPv6 allocations so far.

Kenya and Nigeria come in jointly at a distant second position, each having utilised only 7 per cent of the allocated IPv6 address space.

Perhaps it is time the government revived and mobilised the old IPv6 Taskforce, which was commissioned way back in 2008 but met an early death, before it had delivered on its mandate.

Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya, Faculty of Computing and IT. Email: [email protected], Twitter: @jwalu