Bwana, On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 3:55 PM, <bitange@jambo.co.ke> wrote:
Just had a meeting with top officials of Verisign, hosts of more than 80 root servers. He says they will exhaust IPv4 in the next 6 months. The debate is whether they should acquire African IP addreses in some sort of secondary market while they migrate to IPV6.
The people at Veri$ign didn't come to the most recent AfriNIC meeting, and therefore, don't realise that this is not possible according to the policy that found consensus at that meeting. Verisign could certainly set up a Local Internet Registry from AfriNIC, but they could only use those IPs in Africa (or to connectivity to Africa). <BN> US is just beggining the implementation of v6. They foresee a crisis within the next six months not only with the addresses but the confusion in addressing. Well, the USA as a government began long ago, but the gov't networks still are not fully v6 yet. Private networks lag behind in many cases. While not a "crisis", I would say there will definitely be some confusion, despite the many efforts of the Internet Technical Community over the last decade to do outreach on this issue. As they say in the USA, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink" In other words, Many networks will not switch until they are forced to by a lack of IPv4 address availability (or the expense of same in a "secondary market"). -- Cheers, McTim "A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how we get there." Jon Postel