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."

Comments

More Nigerian spam mail because of more computers

[ilovesymbian]

Dear sirs, I am a prince of a country that's caught in war between using ipv4 and ipv6. If you deposit $100,000 I will promise you returns of 10,000 million IPv6 IP addresses. Please send me your account number, SSN, credit card details and other important detail that will help me facilitate the transaction.

Yours lovingly,

His Royal Highness Prince of some Nigerian tribe

Simple

[SlashDev]

because most African networks are being created and not migrated.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

because most African networks are being created and not migrated.

Of course. African networks are non-migratory.

Re:Simple

[hedwards]

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.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Otherwise we'd have to worry about the network speed of an unladen African network.

Re:Simple

[denttford]

Ah, Africa, where the IPs are as plentiful as Zimbabwean dollars.

Makes sense

[mangu]

Considering that African nations have each a small fraction of the 16 million addresses that the GE corporation has, they need something better than NAT.

Re:Makes sense

[neoform]

That, and the lack of existing infrastructure that needs to be changed in order to meet IPv6. There probably wasn't a huge "switch" phase involved in having IPv6 deployed, whereas the western world is on IPv4, switching to IPv6 actually takes a lot of work.

Re:The US should pay attention

[linhares]

Well, after Congress rejected the bailout, the shares of Campbell Soup went up.

And I'm NOT making this up!

I knew Angelina Jolie would trigger ...

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

... this massive craze for adoptions in Africa. But never imagined it would extend from H sapiens to IPv6. Go Jolie

Being first has no benefit

[Wesley Felter]

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.

Re:Being first has no benefit

[A beautiful mind]

No benefit? You can get free porn via turning on ipv6. See more here.

Re:Being first has no benefit

[mikael_j]

Except the project is not yet up and running, so it's quite useless even for those of us who do have IPv6 connectivity...

/Mikael

If you are just starting

[BlackSnake112]

If you were building a network when you had nothing before, why not start with IPv6.

Re:The US should pay attention

[linhares]

C'mon moderators, THIS SHIT IS NOT FUNNY!

From The Economist:

The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished down by 7%, and suffered its biggest-ever points loss. Perhaps fittingly in an economy that is in danger of sliding into depression, the only stock among the 500 in the S&P index that finished higher was Campbell's Soup.

Re:and in unrelated news...

[OverlordQ]

Jeez, the first new waves of botnets are from the third world. Script kiddies and mass mailers will be so proud!

Not really. You can't exactly scan an IPv6 range with the same efficiency as you can a IPv4 range. The chances of finding a live machine on the other end is really really really .... really small.

Re:The US should pay attention

[rugatero]

Being modded funny doesn't mean they didn't believe you - true things can be funny too, although perhaps this is only funny in a "well, you've gotta laugh or you'd cry" kind of way.

A little too easy

[hesaigo999ca]

Its pretty easy to adopt a new standard when there was nothing in place yet to begin with,
come on...what do they have over there 4 or 5 servers ...tops?

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.

Re:'Africa' is a racist term

[fiannaFailMan]

How would you propose that we call that entire continent ?

The continent formally known as Africa?

Re:Slackers!

[rugatero]

He's probably using IPv6. His post got delayed by the transition mechanism.

Re:'Africa' is a racist term

[pieleric]

For the info, the wikipedia article proposes 5 different etymologies, none related to this one.

Actually, I cannot even find references to a Greek king named Afros. The closer mythical Greek I found is Aphrodite, but that has a rather different connotation!

Really, you should not believe everything you read on the internet.

Re:Slackers!

[davester666]

what's shocking is that it was 4 minutes before first post!

Simple solution

[saigon_from_europe]

I really don't know what is this fuss about lack of IP numbers.

If we already write them as xxx.yyy.zzz.ttt, why we stop at 255? We could simply go up to 999! Even better, we could use the letters too. Imagine all the possibilities if we take separately lower case and upper case!

And finally, when we exhaust these too, we could move to unicode.

Re:Simple solution

[thetartanavenger]

255 = (2 ^ 8) - 1, or two to the power eight minus one.

It's the maximum number that can be made with 8 bits in binary, and hence eight wires between to different chips at the hardware level. Instead of going to 999, it would have to either be:
(2 ^ 9) - 1 = 511 or
(2 ^ 10) - 1 = 1023
else you'd just be wasting a large section available bandwidth.

Not all of the world runs on the decimal system..

Re:Simple solution

[Fumus]

Yeah. And people would get IP's like "eat.his.ass.out". Great idea.

Re:The US should pay attention

[tsalmark]

Can you say Shadenfreude. Not all of us live in the USA.

Nothing new at all

[EmbeddedJanitor]

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.

Hi, welcome to Slashdot

[XanC]

You're right, but you still lose. You'll get the hang of it soon; stick with it.

It has been done

[mangu]

If we already write them as xxx.yyy.zzz.ttt, why we stop at 255?

The answer is, we don't. For an example of an IP address with numbers going over 255, watch this movie

The joy of statistics: "Journalists" being wrong

[fuzzel]

The numbers to add, so to NOT confuse the people who now shout that Africa is going so great:

See SixXS Ghost Route Hunter for the live data:

* 6bone (144) (phased out on 6/6/2006)
* RIPE (1119)
* APNIC (490)
* ARIN (706)
* LACNIC (115)
* AfriNIC (60)

There are thus ONLY 60 IPv6 allocations in the African region, if you then follow the link, you will find the following nice thing: "Thus 19 (33.33%) networks are currently correctly announced."
As there barely is no Internet in Africa, (especially when looking at ASNs, and remember that a lot of US ASN's are used in Africa) yes you might reach 22%.

Wow, yes that is a lot compared to the rest of the world:
AFRINIC - 19 (33.33%)
LACNIC - 37 (32.17%)
APNIC - 223 (45.70%)
ARIN - 239 (34.00%)
RIPE - 548 (49.02%)

Europe wins again! :)

Statistics again show how easily things can be misunderstood and interpreted in various ways.