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The Internet Networking

Africa Leads In IPv6 Adoption 122

Posted by timothy from the rising-tide-all-boats dept.
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."
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Africa Leads In IPv6 Adoption More

Africa Leads In IPv6 Adoption

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  • More Nigerian spam mail because of more computers (Score:5, Funny)

    by ilovesymbian ( 1341639 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2008 @03:26PM (#25223327)

    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

    • The story was posted at 12:22. This post appeared at 12:26. That means it took four whole minutes for somebody to make the obligatory Nigerian SPAM joke.

      Darn it, Slashdot just ain't what it use to be.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by rugatero ( 1292060 )
        He's probably using IPv6. His post got delayed by the transition mechanism.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by davester666 ( 731373 )

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

    • They might also email you to say, "Happy Independence Day'.

  • Simple (Score:5, Informative)

    by SlashDev ( 627697 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2008 @03:26PM (#25223337) Homepage
    because most African networks are being created and not migrated.
    • The great thing about this moment in history is that latecomers can get the cost savings and other positive externalities that took years/decades to develop elsewhere. I, for one, welcome our new... oh well, forget about that one.

      • It's not like it is getting cheaper for the earlier adopters to convert.

        • actually that's exactly what it means.

          if you don't have bundles of hardware to replace and upgrade, you don't have to spend as much money building your network.

    • Re:Simple (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 01, 2008 @04:08PM (#25224021)

      because most African networks are being created and not migrated.

      Of course. African networks are non-migratory.

      • I nearly woke up half the street HAH-ing to that one ;)

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

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

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by hedwards ( 940851 )

      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.

    • because most African networks are being created and not migrated.

      Precisely. This is why I tagged this article "duh" and encourage everyone else to do the same.

  • Obviously they're doing this so that Nigerian scammers can never be traced from one IP address.

  • Makes sense (Score:5, Informative)

    by mangu ( 126918 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2008 @03:30PM (#25223403)

    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.

  • I knew Angelina Jolie would trigger ... (Score:4, Funny)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2008 @03:34PM (#25223481) Journal
    ... this massive craze for adoptions in Africa. But never imagined it would extend from H sapiens to IPv6. Go Jolie

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      really, really lame.

  • Being first has no benefit (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Wesley Felter ( 138342 ) <wesley@felter.org> on Wednesday October 01, 2008 @03:35PM (#25223491) Homepage

    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: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by A beautiful mind ( 821714 )
      No benefit? You can get free porn via turning on ipv6. See more here [ipv6experiment.com].

      • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        No benefit? You can get free porn via turning on ipv6. See more here [ipv6experiment.com].

        All I see is

        May update

        We've now got all the content and servers ready. After a few last minute copyright license issues are resolved, we launch soon! Status updates have been posted to the mailing list. Subscribe, or check the archives for the latest discussion.

        This page is describing the IPv6 experiment itself, and is primarily intended for networking researchers and software professionals to learn about and discuss the experiment. If you're here for the free content, it's not here! We're not ready for the world to know about this experiment yet, so don't go submitting this to Slashdot or Digg until the actual site is up.

        Emphasis mine. They obviously have a different definition of soon than I do.

      • Re:Being first has no benefit (Score:4, Informative)

        by mikael_j ( 106439 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2008 @04:05PM (#25223973)

        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

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

          So did you realize that before or after you got hooked up with IPv6?

          • Before, actually. But I've been checking out the site every now and then just to see if they plan on ever getting it up and running.

            /Mikael

      • no there isn't, and i quote

        This page is describing the IPv6 experiment itself, and is primarily intended for networking researchers and software professionals to learn about and discuss the experiment. If you're here for the free content, it's not here! We're not ready for the world to know about this experiment yet, so don't go submitting this to Slashdot or Digg until the actual site is up.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Scutter ( 18425 )

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

        You mean "eventually at some future unannounced date, but not right now". The last update was four months ago and it still says "coming soon".

        • That's one Hell of a priapism...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Fred_A ( 10934 )

          "We anticipate beginning this experiment in the February-March timeframe."

          Of course there's no year attached. So presumably they'll run it from their abode in Jupiter orbit, in 2097, when at least 5% of the network will have switched.

          • I remember that page reading pretty much identically over a year ago.. so it isn't new.

            IMO it's just a practical joke to make people say 'free porn' and go to it. The dates say the last update was January this year.

            If it *isn't* a practical joke.. if it really *does* take 18 months to setup an ipv6 web site, ipv6 is doomed.

    • 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.

      You may not get much of a benefit, other

      • Ciscos do as well (much better than the apple jobbie too in my experience).

      • My router, an old Aptiva, certainly would support IPv6. What my DSL modem supports when operated as a router is irrelevant since I have no intention of enable those features.

  • If you are just starting (Score:3, Insightful)

    by BlackSnake112 ( 912158 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2008 @03:37PM (#25223523)

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

    • Well, the rest of the world can't reach you.

      I guess that could be considered a feature.

    • 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.

  • A little too easy (Score:2, Interesting)

    by hesaigo999ca ( 786966 )

    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.

  • Simple solution (Score:5, Funny)

    by saigon_from_europe ( 741782 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2008 @04:10PM (#25224033)

    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.

    • 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: (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      There are 10 types of people in this world.

      Those that understand BINARY, and those that dont.

    • Not so simple.

      255 is the largest number than can be fit into 8 bits. If we were to allow addresses up to 999 then the entire TCI/IP protocol stack would have to be redesigned to allow for more bits in an IP address. Which would of course cause exactly the same issue the world has with IPv6.

    • Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Funny)

      by Fumus ( 1258966 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2008 @04:39PM (#25224419)
      Yeah. And people would get IP's like "eat.his.ass.out". Great idea.

    • 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 [imdb.com]

  • Of course IPV6 is seeing a lot of use in those areas.

    Everyone knows that everything spreads faster in africa! :P

    Disclaimer: I know this was a karma burn... but it was wide open(no pun intended). This joke brought to you by the related news post from today's science.slashdot.org

    • Don't worry, your joke was actually half funny.

      changes from the "All of the x computers they have" jokes.

  • I always thought that Japan has been the leader in IPv6 deployment for quite a while now considering that the Japanese government is backing IPv6 [fcw.com].
  • "which services networks in Africa and the Indian Ocean." There are networks in the Indian Ocean? Thats the real news here.....

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by jagdish ( 981925 )
      Internet connectivity to Mumbai is via undersea links from UAE (dubai I think). The other connection is from Singapore. So yeah you could say that there is a network cable running underneath the Indian ocean.

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

    See SixXS Ghost Route Hunter [sixxs.net] 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

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