[AfriNIC-rpd] What is our take on the central pool IPv4 exhaustion?

[Graham Beneke]

Badru Ntege wrote:
> 
> Sure as night follows day depletion is coming and Transistion will have to
> happen so in a way the debate on getting more of what is to become legacy
> internet could be diversion and concentrating on building a cohesive
> continental plan to transition from v4 to v6 might be the right path to
> take.  It's all a game of numbers and if Africa as one voice decides to
> transistion we might be able to change the underlying economic dynamics
> enough to make it economically viable for African networks to overhaul their
> legacy V4 networks.  
>

Relatively speaking Africa has much fewer legacy networks than say the 
US or EU. With the massive growth that telecoms the continent is 
experiencing it is an ideal arena to be deploying IPv6 networks.

The seems to be a perception that IP resources are extremely scarce on 
the continent. This can be blamed on service providers charging up to 
$30 for a single IP address. Now would definitely not be the time that 
we turn that idea around.

As I understand it AfriNIC has 2 full /8's (and a number of smaller 
blocks that they have taken over from other RIR's). One of the policy 
documents mentioned earlier suggested 5 /8's each for the RIR's. This 
would allow Internet infrastructure on the continent to grow to about 4 
times its current size before we start experiencing an IPv4 shortage. I 
do not think that this would be a wise move.

> Maybe AfriNIC needs a policy that ensures that for any established LIR to
> get anymore allocations they need to implement an active V6 network.  We
> could even go as far as proposing that any large allocation from time x
> needs to have a corresponding V6 allocation.
> 

A very good idea but I think we would need to have some sort of 
evaluation that allows us to determine if the LIR is actually going to 
use the v6 allocation.

No point in handing out lots of free v6 blocks to LIR's who are just 
running v4 networks anyway.

Graham

-- 
Graham Beneke
Apolix Internet Services
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