[AFRINIC-rpd] Academic IPv4 Allocation Policy Second Draft (AFPUB-2013-GEN-001-DRAFT-02)

[SM]

At 12:29 16-01-2013, Andrew Alston wrote:
>Given that the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Africa are 
>growing, and that Internet access within these academic Institutions 
>is critical to the educational experience of students, it is 
>necessary to provide sufficient address space to these HEIs to allow 
>them to function effectively.  When we consider that such institutions are

I went through some old statistics.  Internet access in some parts of 
Africa when compared to the U.S was 100 times more expensive.  With 
the necessary infrastructure Internet access is twice as expensive 
when compared to the U.S.  The following was said four years ago:

   "IXPs in Africa count their throughput in megabit per second, and 
sometimes even
    kilobit per second. The rest of the world tends to be concerned 
with gigabit
    per second."

There hasn't been much of a change since then.  There is a well-known 
provider established outside the region which sees about 50% of its 
traffic coming from a well-known company.  Some parts of that traffic 
ends up in Africa.  Anyone who has an interest in Africa as a whole 
might wish to look into the details and see whether it can help 
reduce the cost of Internet access in the region.

Getting IP addresses cheaply is a minor part as the picture.  If this 
proposal can ease the distribution of IP addresses to over 50 
universities in the region (I excluded Nigeria and South Africa for 
obvious reasons) it can be a good thing.

 From an IP addressing perspective the following suggestion is a bad 
idea.  I suggest adding a condition in the proposal for connectivity 
to an IXP within the region.

Regards,
-sm