South African IPv4 address exhaustion could be as close as a year away, leaving businesses facing costly and disruptive upgrade programmes, and halting the provision of new Internet services.
IPv4 addresses are in short supply worldwide: earlier this month, RIPE NCC (the regional Internet registrar for Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia) announced it was down to its last /8 block of available IPv4 address blocks, with emergency measures in place to minimise allocations. In Africa, matters are facing the same urgent crisis, but with a little more time to prepare.
AfriNIC is the agency responsible for regional IP address allocation, and CEO Adiel Akplogan believes the continent has more breathing space, but will experience the same crisis eventually. "There's no immediate danger," Akplogan says. "We have enough addresses to last three, four, maybe five years. But it will become a dangerous situation. When it comes, we will quickly hit a wall. A rush to migrate will be costly and difficult."
Demand for IP addresses on the continent is steadily growing, Akplogan says, but IPv6 demand is tiny by comparison (AfriNIC publishes allocation data at its Web site). "We're seeing very slow penetration of IPv6: about 11%," he says.
SA, with more developed networks than many of its African neighbours, may be even closer to that wall. Internet Solutions CTO Prenesh Padayachee believes local networks may run out of IPv4 addresses "in the next year or two". The service provider has already started rationing, he says. "We're managing our address space very diligently. We don't allocate large chunks unnecessarily."
Careful planning
Migrating to IPv6 requires updating network equipment and careful planning to ensure every part of the network and application stack is upgraded, or migrated to an environment which can map between IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.
Enterprises and service providers who are behind on planning face expensive upgrades, Padayachee says.
"Routing equipment has a lifespan of five to seven years. If you have new equipment that is not IPv6-capable, you may have to replace it and take the capex hit."
Internet Solutions has converted its entire core network to IPv6-capable equipment, he says, and is running IPv4 and IPv6 services in parallel, and key services like international peering arrangements and DNS have also been upgraded. But, IS started its journey towards IPv6 many years ago, with the luxury of time to explore its options.
"We started an IPv6 test bed in 2005 or 2006, cut our teeth on it and developed the skills. We started deployment of IPv6 in our core network two or three years ago - we have no legacy equipment that is not IPv6 capable now."
Rushing to migrate will not only be expensive, it will also result in business disruption. "When it comes, the rush will be costly and difficult for businesses," Akplogar says. "For example, we may find ourselves in a position where we can no longer accept new Web sites, driving business elsewhere."
IPv6 adoption should not just be about crisis management, Padayachee says. "People are slow to migrate, because they understand IPv4 so well, and IPv6 is unfamiliar. They don't understand the benefits, like improved security and scalability."
The explosion of mobile devices is a major factor in the approaching IP address crunch. "Generation Y is growing up fast and has very different needs," Padayachee says. "There's a proliferation of devices which need addresses, and unique addresses at that. Workarounds like NAT won't be sufficient for future networks."
The migration to IPv6, however slow and disruptive, is inevitable, Akplogar stresses. "IPv6 is the natural evolution of the Internet. The only question is: how do we migrate? Not whether we migrate. We simply do not have a choice. And there is an opportunity too: emerging regions need future proof networks to connect billions of disconnected people."
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