Telecoms monopolies a threat to Internet growth

An international meeting on the future of the Internet is under way in Nairobi.

Internet has accelerated commerce globally and is at a defining moment.

Internet addresses on the current platform IPV4, are rapidly declining, helped by the massive uptake of new technologies in emerging economies.

An analysis by network technology firm Cisco projects that the pool of IPV4 addresses will have run out by mid next year.

It is estimated that only 10 per cent of the possible 4.3 billion addresses are remaining.

The viable solution is seen in IPV6, a new platform with a huge capacity to provide billions of addresses.

Apart from access concerns, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is hosting the meeting, has come under sharp criticism for not allowing the registration of more domain names.

But ICANN says it is working on issuing new names and says fears of shortage of IPV6 addresses are not accurate.

Business Daily spoke to Rod Beckstrom, the CEO of ICANN, the body that allocates and co-ordinates Internet addresses, on the sidelines of the Nairobi meeting.

There is an ongoing concern about the depletion of IPV4 addresses and the likely consequences. What is the status of the addresses globally and in developing countries?

First of all, there is an excellent regional Internet registry here (Afrinic) which has done a really great job. It is serving 800 Internet service providers and other technology companies that consume and need Internet addresses in Africa. It is an example of one of the best functioning regional Internet registries in the world and has been allocating IPV4 and IPV6.

Under IPV6, they have made some allocations in Africa — to give you an idea of the scale of those addresses, the smallest blocks of IPV6 that one can allocate has tens of trillions of addresses.

The current Internet uses several billions, so Africa already has an aggregate of trillions of IPV6 addresses and there is no shortage. Every single ISP in Africa that requests the addresses from Afrinic and demonstrates a need will receive one or several trillion address blocks. There are therefore more than enough IPV6 addresses.

The major problem has not been the availability of IPV6 addresses from ICANN or the regional registries. Rather, it is feared that a slow rollout of IPV6 networks will deny organisations the benefit of its numerous addresses once those on IPV4 run out.

I think Africa is on track with regard to deployment of IPV6.