IPV6 Council Advocates For Speedy Adoption

THE Internet Protocol Version Six,IPv6, Council Nigeria, has called on key players in the telecoms sector of the country to speedy up the adoption of the protocol.

The Council Chairman, Mr. Muhammed Rudman who made the call during a courtesy visit to the Executive Vice Chairman, EVC, of the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, Prof. Umar Garba Danbatta noted that the world of Internet is going out of Internet Protocol version Four (IPv4) addresses, hence the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated the remaining eight IPv4 address blocks to each of the 5 Regional Internet Registries, RIR namely AP-NIC, RIPE-NCC, AFRI-NIC, ARIN and LACNIC in 2011.

He explained that the new IPv6 will open a pool of Internet addresses, a billion-trillion times larger than the total pool of IPv4 address, which is about 4.3 billion, pointing out that this means the number of IPv6 addresses is virtually inexhaustible for the foreseeable future.

According to him, his, the need of the ever expanding world population, the growth of the domain name system is due to the opening of the new generic Top Level Domains and the emerging Internet of Things.

He equally said most of the developed world has already embraced IPv6, with countries competing for positions in the global ranking on IPv6 adoption, lamenting that Nigeria is lacking so far.

IPV6 Counncil with NCC officails

"Unfortunately, most of the African countries are late on this mass migration, with Nigeria particularly lagging behind even within Africa, this should not be taken lightly considering that we have the largest number of Internet users in Africa and the seventh in the world." he said.

Rudman who is also the Chief Executive Officer, Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN) disclosed that major content producers such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft have all adapted IPv6 giving the opportunity to IPv6 networks access to their contents.

Danbatta assured the Council of NCC’s to encourage telcos to key into IPv6 deployment in the country and through facilitation of capacity building workshops, pointing that it may be difficult to identify all the challenges hindering IPv6 adoption in Nigeria.