Mr
James Chirwa
(AFRINIC Ltd)
AFRINIC LTD is one of the 5 Regional Internet Registry(RIR) and it’s service region covers the entire AFRICA continent and part of the Indian Ocean Islands, and it’s headquartered in Mauritius.
AFRINIC’s core business include the distribution and management of Internet Protocol number resources (IPv4, IPv6 and ASN). AFRINIC also provides various services and trainings related to these IP number resources.
Globally, IPv4 addresses are exhausted and its only AFRINIC which has the remaining pool of IPv4 addresses to issue. Currently AFRINIC is already in the softlanding phase (maximum /13 can be issued to a member at one go) and now approaching.
UbuntuNet-Connect 2017 with the theme “Enabling Intra-African Collaboration in Research and Education” presents a great opportunity to AFRINIC for an increased level of engagement with the Research and Education Networking community, with the objectives of improving our collaboration and increase awareness on IP resources and related services; in turn ensuring that the Intra-African Collaboration is achieved with greater degree of scalability.
AFRINIC presentations shall cover across the following:
a. Policies – How policies are developed and implemented, how the polices impact members of the community.
b. AFRINIC Services – IP Number resource management, DNS related services, Internet Routing Registry, RPKI and Trainings.
c. How AFRINIC fit into the REN community and Initiatives by AFRINIC to increase IP address uptake by the academic institutions.
d. IPv4 exhaustion and depletion updates.
e. IPv6 uptake updates
Underlying principles that are crucial to consider when designing networks being covered:
a. Scalability – Advantages of network scalability with global IP addresses and limitations of RFC1918 space.
b. Global reachability – Some services performs better in end-to-end network models and has proven to be challenging on many instances running IP NAT.
c. Redundancy - E-services are becoming critical in many aspects our daily lives, uptime and resilience of these services is critical.
d. Autonomy - Institutions can easily manage traffic and routing polices as an autonomous system rather than being enveloped by the service providers network.
e. Content localisation - AFRINIC takes note of this aspect as one of major objectives of UbuntuNet Alliance and other similar regional REN’s.
Summary
As the members of the research and education networking community of Eastern and Southern Africa plus others sharing common and special interests come together to brainstorm on research and education networking activities; AFRINIC as part of its outreach activities will be on site to learn and understand the progress made so far, the plans moving ahead and challenges faced and also take an extra mile through this presentation to provide awareness in our role as regional Internet registry, the services we provide and importance of adopting some of the best common practices with regards to information technology networks, in order to improve on the network infrastructure performance and facilitate service growth and easier adoption of new technologies.
