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

[Bill Woodcock]

      On Sun, 12 Aug 2007, Andrew Alston wrote:
    > How does it make sense for us  to do everything we can to prolong 
    > the life of IPv4 on the continent while the rest of the world is 
    > going to be *forced* to move to something else, by doing this all 
    > we are doing is once again condemning ourselves to living behind the 
    > rest of the world, at their mercy again.

I think perhaps this rests on the assumption that the rest of the world 
will be converting to IPv6 over the next couple of years.  While I'd very 
much love for that to happen, the process has been going on for twelve 
years already, and is likely to take another fifteen to complete.  So 
people in the rest of the world will continue to be using more IPv4 
addresses each year than the year before, for a while yet.

So, I encourage everyone to do whatever they can to make IPv6 a reality as 
soon as possible, but also not to burn any bridges behind, just yet.  
There are a lot of users in the world who won't have access to IPv6 
content for quite some time, and a lot of content that won't be accessible 
to IPv6-only users for quite some time.  Dual-stack deployments will exist 
for quite a while.

                                -Bill