The regional body responsible for the distribution and management of Internet addresses on the continent has announced that it has inched closer to depleting the current pool of internet addresses in Africa.
The African Network Information Center (AFRINIC) said in a statement the first round of the IPV4 address phase out in Africa is almost exhausted, meaning the addresses will soon no longer be available.
The IP addresses are the website’s equivalent of telephone numbers.
They are used behind the scenes anytime data moves online. For example, when a laptop requests a Web page or a smartphone posts an Instagram photo.
Last year, Internet Service Provider Liquid Telecom Kenya warned that failure to migrate to the new address would impact the continent’s network reliability and stability.
Africa is currently on the older IPv4 addresses, while the world is migrating to the new Internet Protocol, the IPv6.
“The AFRINIC IPv4 inventory will soon reach a point where the current phase will end, and exhaustion of phase 1 of the IPv4 soft landing policy will begin,” said Andrew Alston, a board member at AFRINIC, which manages the continent’s IP addresses.
Africa is the last continent with available IPv4 addresses, but it is now also running short.
“We are almost eating into the last block of 16 million addresses of the IPv4 space that the regional Internet registry for Africa has available. This means we are soon entering a new phase where getting IPv4 addresses will become far more difficult and eventually impossible — there won’t be any more to give. So it is important that ISPs start to deploy IPv6,” said Liquid Telecom group head of IP strategy Andrew Alston.
Transiting to IPv6, which has been a global issue, is now well advanced in the rest of the world, following from the limitations of IPv4, designed in 1981.
Companies that run out of IPv4 addresses can upgrade to IPv6 by purchasing new network switches and routers. About 9 per cent of the Internet globally had been estimated to have done that as at last year.
Source - BusinessDailyAfrica