Nigeria’s use of Internet Protocol version 4 still poor -expert

Mr Muhammed Rudman, the Chief Executive Officer, IXPN/ Chair IPV6 Council of Nigeria, says Nigeria has used only seven per cent of Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPV4) and is still lagging behind in Africa.

Rudman made this known on Wednesday in Lagos at theDigital SENSE Forum Series 2018 in his presentation the theme: “IPV6: Broadening the Horizon in Nigeria”.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the theme of the forum is “Internet Governance: Sustaining Development”.

According to him, Africa is the least in the world using the IPV4 address and Nigeria is really small compared to other countries.

Rudman said that every device connected to the Internet needed a unique number known as IP address issued by Nigeria Communication Commission (NCC).

He listed IPV4 and IPV6 as the two types of IP addresses.

“Africa is far behind when it comes to IPV6, the whole world is moving to IPV6 and Nigeria has to move because it is still at seven per cent even with IPV4 and really lagging behind, he said.

Rudman said that there were challenges associated with the use of IPV6 in Nigeria, which ranged from lack of technical know-how and lack of IPV6 upstream service providers.

He said that the core, metro and edge equipment compatibility issues as well as non request from end users were the challenges to IPV6 in Nigeria.

According to him, the way forward is to create awareness and capacity building as well as organising seminars and trainings.

He added that possibly incorporating IPV6 into university curriculum was another way forward.

“IPV6 taskforce is to visit top service providers with IPV6 allocation but not yet activated.

“Provide some prolific incentives to Internet industry to encourage them to adopt IPV6 based structure.

“These incentives could include reduction fee in regulatory fee and tax rebate,” he said.

NAN reports that Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) was the fourth revision of the Internet Protocol and a widely used protocol in data communication over different kinds of networks.

IPv4 is a connection-less protocol used in packet-switched layer networks, such as Ethernet while IPV6 is the version six which has more speed and enables more security in the network environment.