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Africa Leads In IPv6 Adoption
Ian Lamont writes "The recent news that China will run out of IPv4 addresses in a few years points to slow adoption of IPv6 in some developed countries. Now it turns out that the largest number of networks displaying new IPv6 address blocks are registered through AfriNIC, which services networks in Africa and the Indian Ocean. While AfriNIC has a smaller installed base than other regions, many countries in Africa are showing rapid growth in terms of online connectivity."
Because at the rate they're going they'll be a 3rd world nation, too, in no time. Watch how it's done on the cheap in Africa because you're about to get a real-life lesson in shoestring budgets.
You need to enable IPv6 when IPv4 runs out around 2011 so that you can communicate with IPv6-only users. There's no benefit to turning it on early (unless you want to do debugging for vendors). Articles about how some country or another is "ahead" or "behind" in IPv6 are misguided because they're measuring the wrong thing. What is important is not who is running IPv6 today, but who is buying IPv6-capable equipment today so that they can turn it on "for free" in 2011.
Also, the summary propagates the old China IPv4 myth; in reality China will run out of IPv4 at the same time as the rest of the world.
Its pretty easy to adopt a new standard when there was nothing in place yet to begin with, ...tops?
come on...what do they have over there 4 or 5 servers
Seriously, when I was offered a contract to develop a government project in Africa,
I was told there was so much corruption in government, that even if we developed our
software, it probably would not be used, as there was too many people wanting to
keep the present day systems, as this was the way they made the extra revenues, and
able to make their mortgages. It was a smoke screen to show there was development
but not that it would actually be used.
This does not just apply to networks, it applies to just about everything. When Germany installed new phone systems after the war, guess what: they were the most up to date and automated systems in the world.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
That was precisely my thought, it's not that they need the extra addresses or necessarily think they will in the foreseeable future, but everybody else is going that way and it's cheaper to do it now than to redo things in the future.
That being said, I'm not sure that I'd care to be responsible for saying that at some future time that ipv4 was a mistake for them.
And either way, everybody else is going ipv6, so they may as well.