Networks to Experience Difficulties on Internet as IPV4 Runs Out

New service providers as well as existing networks wanting to expand their networks are to face difficulties in accessing Internet Protocol Version 4 as the resource nears exhaustion in Africa.

AFRINIC the only manager of Internet number resources in Africa had announced that its remaining IPV4 is now on its last block which consists of only 16 million IP address and could be exhausted very soon.

Reacting to this development Mohammed Rudman, chairman, IPv6 Council Nigeria, said that the announcement by AFRINIC means that the last IPV4 internet address is coming to an end as Africa is the only region in the world that still has IPV4.

He explained that the implication of the exhaustion on Nigeria which is predominantly using IPV4 is the new internet service providers as well as existing networks that want to expand their network will find it difficult to get IPV4 which most networks in Nigeria run on.

“In view of the fact that the resource is nearing exhaustion, it is no longer readily available as it used to be, it is now being rationed and scarce. This means that new service providers will have resort to the use of IPV6 which has more capacity,” he said.

He added: “We have advised network operators long before now to start adopting IPV6 in parallel with IPV4 for them not to face steep learning curve but gradual. Now that IPV4 is exhausting they will face difficulties in migration process. However, some networks have acquired IPV6 in Nigeria but are yet to deploy it for use they will now begin to deploy it for use.”.

Lanre Ajayi, managing director, Pinet Informatics and member of IPv6 Council Nigeria, corroborated Rudman, but attributed the delay by operators in the country to deploy IPV6 to people’s resistance to.

“In other regions, networks planned their migration in advance but here we want the regulator to force us to migrate, now that the resource is no longer available we are going to learn in a hard way. There is a limit to the use of Network Address Translation (NAT) which operators are using to convert private addresses of internet protocol (IP) to public addresses thereby making the country to consume less resource of IP addresses,” he said.

Olusola Teniola, president, Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON), decries the low level of IPV6 deployment in the country.

“The deployment of IPv6 is currently very low in the country and though there is a national Nigerian IPv6 Council formulating a Nigerian Strategy paper. Only a few organisations have switched on IPv6 and to date traffic is minimal within the country and only transit traffic in between other countries supporting IPv6 version is evident. So, IPv4 is still predominantly used to terminate IP payloads containing WWW, HTML, MPLS and other forms of content into Nigerian based networks,” he said.

He explained that, concentration and effort needs to be a drive to migrate all servers located in the country from IPv4 in a manner that is as seamless as possible, which includes telecoms, banking, other financial institutions, e-POS platforms and e-commerce networks.