Broadband: Expert urges African countries to migrate from IPv4 to IPv6

Mukon Tamon, the Training Manager of African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC) Ltd, on Tuesday called on African countries to promptly migrate from Internet Protocol version Four (IPv4) to IPv6. Tamon made the call in Abuja at the 11th Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation (CTO) Forum, which has “Innovation Through Broadband” as its theme. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Internet Protocol (IP) is an addressing system that assigns numbers to every internet device. Tamon said the need for migration to IPv6 arose when IPv4, with a total capacity of 4.3 billion addresses, became exhausted, adding that the IPv6 was capable of accommodating trillions of addresses. He underscored the need for African countries to migrate to IPv6 to prevent them from becoming technologically bridged. He stressed that African governments should declare that any telecoms equipment brought into their countries must be IPv6-compliant. Tamon said the governments should also train their customs agencies and equip them with the wherewithal to identify IPv6-compliant infrastructure, as part of efforts to regulate equipment imports. He reiterated that if Africa failed to migrate to IPv6 on time, acquisition of new technologies would be meaningless while the continent would be cut off from development. He urged African countries to educate themselves on the relevance of the new protocol — IPv6 — to facilitate hitch-free migration. However, Margaret Mudenda, the Director-General of Zambia Information and Communications Technology Authority, said one of the challenges facing IPv6 was the issue of content. She said that most content on the Internet were on IPv4; hence the need to develop content that would make IPv6 more effective. Mudenda, nonetheless, urged African governments to make the migration to IPv6 a top priority. She said that there was security assurance in IPv6, when compared to what was obtainable in IPv4.