[Community-Discuss] Questions about AfriNIC Allocations

[S Moonesamy]

Dear Andrew,
At 12:25 AM 09-12-2018, Andrew Alston wrote:
>In order for the internet environment to thrive we need the 
>potential for large scale interconnection that is predicated on 
>companies having asns - and this includes enterprise customers 
>across all sectors.
>
>Interconnection and free traffic exchange is critical to the growth 
>of the internet industry and our goals of getting to a majority of 
>content being exchanged directly on the continent.  It is also 
>critical to build the critical mass, a requirement to justify the 
>investment in infrastructure such as data centers.
>
>Yes while my stats were proven wrong, it still deeply concerns me 
>that when I compare our asn allocation stats to that of lacnic (the 
>closest comparison to where afrinic and Africa is out of the other 
>RIRs - you find that our ASN allocation rate year by year for many 
>years is essentially flat - we hit 150 to 160 allocated every year - 
>but there is no compounded growth that you see in LACNIC where they 
>are allocation well over a thousand asns a year and the allocation 
>numbers have been growing each year.
>
>It is also a concern to me that of the roughly 1600 asns allocated - 
>of those less than 1200 are visible in the DFZ.

Intra-regional traffic, with some exceptions, is relatively low.  As 
mentioned above, it makes it difficult to justify the investment in 
infrastructure if there isn't a demand.  I doubt that there would be 
significant traffic if there is investment to build infrastructure, 
e.g. a data center, as it requires more than that for an ecosystem to flourish.

One of the objectives of an (expired) IPv4 proposal was to review the 
existing policy and assess whether it might have a negative impact on 
the growth of networks in the service region.  It is too late to do 
anything about that as the service region has entered the IPv4 
exhaustion phase.

As at 30 September, there were 1,705 ASNs assigned by Afrinic and 
8,698 ASNs assigned by Lacnic.  As at 8 December, there were 1,228 
(Afrinic-assigned) ASNs and 7,454 (Lacnic-assigned) ASNs visible 
[1].  The yearly rate has not change significantly since 2012.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy

1. I did not verify the figures.