For being among fastest growing ICT nations, IPv6 very urgent in Nigeria—Danbatta
The Executive Vice Chairman of Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Prof Umar Danbatta has explained the reason why Internet Protocol (IP) version 6 is very crucial to Nigeria at the opening ceremony of the 2017 International Workshop on IPV6 and INRM held in Lagos on Tuesday.
In his keynote address presented by Haru Alhassan, Director of New media at the Commission, Danbatta noted that “While the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses is a global phenomenon, the need for IPv6 is even more urgent in Nigeria a location to the fastest growing ICT Industry. IPv6 will enable an enormous increase in the number of Internet addresses currently available under IPv4”.
Explaining more at the event put together by the Association of Telecoms Companies of Nigeria (ATCON) and AFRINIC, the Internet Number Registry for Africa, NCC said “The Nigerian ICT Industry has witnessed tremendous growth, from just 200 Internet Users in 2002 to over 93 Million in 2017”.
“With these growth comes the challenge of sustaining the development to ensure that the industry maintains global relevance and contends with challenges of low Internet penetration, quality of service, cyber security incidents with their attendant security implications as well as issues with the Nation’s perception index amongst others.
“The Commission, mandated by its ACT (NCA 2003), is responsible for the Development, Management and Administration of a national numbering plan and electronic addresses plan and the assignment of numbers and electronic addresses there from to licensees. Electronic addresses includes Internet Protocol Addresses, Autonomous System Numbers and Domain Name System.
Therefore, realizing the importance of IPV6 has tasked the NCC to begin the process for the Nigerian ICT Industry to leverage on the potentials of IPv6 and prepare for the next phase of Internet growth.
Danbatta added further that the deployment of IPv6 is a more sustainable solution that can deliver economic and social opportunities for the future of the Internet economy, as compared to other stop gap measures of either deploying IPv4 Network Address Translation (NAT), that allows devices connect with fewer public IPv4 addresses by using private networks, or trying to obtain previously allocated but unused IPv4 addresses.(OECD Report 2007).
He listed the merits of the new protocol saying “the abounding business and innovation opportunities alone are reason enough for the ICT Industry to make a quick transition to IPv6 capable IT infrastructure”,
Some of the merits include that IPv6 implementation brings much more to the table including increased security and ease of management; IPv6 features a network layer that ensures simpler security management than IPv4, because it has inbuilt security to facilitate encryption and authentication of communications; and Having a full IPv6 infrastructure also makes network management easier and cost effective. It has the advantage of a huge IP address space and an efficient routing mechanism. It reduces the need for routing tables, and also reduces server load. (IMDA 2015).
Earlier in his address of welcome, President of ATCON, Engineer Olusola Teniola said as a stakeholder body, the group will continue to train and retrain Nigerian internet engineers so that knowledge will continue to grow in the sector.
He thanked the management AFRINIC for partnering with ATCON to expand the knowledge base of Nigerian ICT experts.
Teniola noted that “It gives me much pleasure to welcome all of you to this knowledge upgrading event which its fifth edition begins today. For two years consecutively, ATCON singlehandedly hosted this international training with the support of some of its members who believe that the growth of our industry depends considerably on the quality of personnel that are working in the industry”.
“The need to migrate to IPv6 is long overdue and ATCON is not particularly happy that majority of our networks in Nigeria are not IPv6 compatible, and this poses a threat to Nigerian ICT development.
“The Nigerian ICT sector can no longer afford to take the back seat in the global ICT development. To leapfrog the adoption of IPv6, the Association has taken a further step to involve the two key major stakeholders – Prof. Umar Garba
In his remarks, the Director General of NITDA, Dr. Isa Pantami said the workshop is certainly a training that will help promote the implementation of IPv6 for the sustainable development of the Nigerian economy.
He added that “This is in line with NITDA’s statutory mandate to develop the Nigerian economy using IT through human capacity development.
According to him, “Advanced countries have moved from a natural resource based economy to a knowledge based economy, and this was achieved through massive capacity development and implementation of IT. These countries have not only been able to develop IT, but have also utilized IT in the development of other socio-economic sectors of their country so that these sectors can generate wealth and recognition for the country. I am very optimistic that this can also be achieved in our dear country Nigeria with the implementation of NITDA’s mandate and the implementation of workshops such as the one unfolding today.
“The Internet, as we all know is one of the most powerful forces for increasing innovation and economic growth. It has positively affected most of the Nigerian sectors such as banking, government, security, education and the rest. However, the ability and capacity of the Internet to exist and function for economic growth is underpinned not only by software, hardware, and networks but most importantly by IP addressing.
“IP addressing ensures that every host on the Internet can communicate and exchange information. IP version 4 is still very pervasive in the world today, however its usefulness will soon fade because of its limited address space, limited mobility, limited management, limited security, and the inability to support innovative and complex technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), cloud services, IP telephony, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The IoT implementation for example will benefit from IPv6 abundance of IP address space of over a quadrillion addresses (3.4 x 1038). This address space can be assigned to every atom on earth and still have trillions of addresses left.
