Kenya is currently the leading country in Africa in terms of adoption of IPV6 and migration from IPV4. On a global scale, Kenya ranks 47th in IPv6 adoption, alongside Israel and HongKong. This was mentioned during the Africa Domain Name System Forum held at Sarova Panafric Hotel. This is the 3rd forum of its kind targeted at the African Market with the previous ones being held in Durban and Abuja respectively. This year’s forum seeks to discuss the future of Africa’s domain name industry’s opportunities and challenges.
IPV6 is the new internet addressing protocol that is currently under implementation. IPv6 is short for “Internet Protocol Version 6”. It was designed to replace the current Internet Protocol, IP Version 4. IPV6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force anticipating the need for more IP addresses to accommodate the growing number of users and devices accessing the Internet.
Even with the migration and adoption of IPV6, 80% of Africa is still on IPV4. Kenya has been able to leap frog in terms of adoption fueled by extensive training offered by bodies such as KENIC to facilitators such as Internet service providers. KENIC has also released IPV6 blocs earlier than is the case in other African countries. Africa was expected to be one of the fastest adopters of IPV6 as the internet usage and industry is at infancy stage so as the internet usage grows, the adoption increases.
The adoption of IPV6 is becoming a critical issue as IPv4 resources are rapidly diminishing. To better take advantage of such opportunities, the forum will discuss how to increase the number of domain registrations in individual countries. In Kenya .Ke domains stand at 46,000 which, is a small number compared to South Africa with over 1 million. Other countries with higher local domain registration include Nigeria and Egypt.
