African Network Information Center Should Prepare for IPv4 Address Exhaustion Based on Others' Experiences, ICANN Says

The African Network information Center (AFRNIC) should prepare now for the exhaustion of its remaining IPv4 addresses, based on the experiences of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) and other regional Internet registries (RIR) that have run out of their IPv4 allocations, said ICANN Vice President-Technical Engagement Adiel Akplogan Monday in a blog post. ARIN said last week that it had officially run out of IPv4 addresses, making AFRNIC the “last frontier for IPv4,” Akplogan said. “When a region runs out of IPv4 addresses, it does not negatively impact that region's Internet growth and development,” Akplogan said. “To the contrary -- it forces the region to embrace the future. It should not be any different in Africa. The AFRINIC community probably needs to take a closer look at the situation and develop policies that strike the right balance between allowing newcomers to come online and giving the region a chance to actively embrace the future.” ARIN's exhaustion of its IPv4 pool highlights “the need for consumer technology companies to continue joint efforts to move the industry to IPv6,” CEA said in a news release. “There are already more connected devices in the world than IPv4 addressing supports, and companies are using more complicated IPv4 address sharing techniques to compensate,” said CEA Senior Vice President-Research and Standards Brian Markwalter in the release. “With some projections envisioning more than 50 billion devices connected to the Internet as soon as 2020, the time is now for CE manufactures to help lead the shift to IPv6.”