Indian-based Centre for Internet
and Society (CIS) has petitioned the world Internet Protocol (IP) coordinating
body, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) over
suspected sexual harassment of its staff at the ICANN 55 public meeting in
Marrakech, Morocco, reports ITRealms.
The petition directed at ICANN board of directors by CIS Executive Director,
Mr. Sunil Abraham, entitled “Statement on Sexual Harassment at ICANN55”
condemned in strong terms the belittlement of ICANN public meeting.
The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS)
located in Banglore, India, he said, strongly condemns the acts of sexual harassment that took
place against one of CIS representatives, Ms. Padmini Baruah, during ICANN 55
in Marrakech.
“It is completely unacceptable that an
event the scale of an meeting does not have in place a formal redressal
system, a neutral point of contact or even a policy for complainants who have
been put through the ordeal of sexual harassment,” he said.
ICANN, Abraham noted, cannot claim to
be inclusive or diverse if it does not formally recognise a specific procedure
or recourse under such instances, especially for sexually harassed participant.
He pointed out that Ms. Baruah, a law student, is by no
means the first young woman to be subject to such treatment at an ICANN event,
but she is the first to raise a formal complaint which deserves element
of commendation.
CIS also lamented that following the
incident, she was given no immediate remedy or formal recourse, and that has
left her with no option but to make the incident publicly known in the interim.
Stressing that the ombudsman’s office
has been in touch with her, but this administrative process is simply
inadequate for rights-violations.
CIS further said that Ms. Baruah has received support from various community,
staff, and board members.
However, CIS believes that this
situation could be better dealt with through some positive measures and urged
ICANN to carry out some steps in order to make its meetings a truly safe
and inclusive space.
Some of these steps, CIS canvassed to
include instituting a formal redressal system and policy with regard to sexual
harassment within ICANN, which must be displayed on the ICANN website, at the
venue of meetings and made available in delegate kits.
The Centre equally
requested ICANN to institute an ‘Anti Sexual Harassment Committee’ that is
neutral and approachable, insisting that mere having an ombudsman who is a
white male, no matter well intentioned, is inadequate and completely unhelpful
to the complainant.
“The present
situation is one where the ombudsman has no effective power and only advises
the board,” Abraham said.
In addition, ICANN
the Centre urged to conduct periodic gender and sexual harassment training of
the ICANN board to help them better understand these issues, as well as conduct
periodic gender and sexual harassment training for the ombudsman even if he or she
will not be the exclusive point of contact for complainants as the ombudsman
forms an important part of community and participant engagement.
Lastly, CIS advised
ICANN to conduct periodic gender sensitisation for the ICANN community.
Rasheed
Adegoke is the Group Head,
Information Technology (IT) at First Bank of Nigeria plc. In this exclusive
interview REMMY NWEKE, he says FBN would reduce transaction time to two
minutes. Excerpt:
Let’s start by you telling us how your team has been using
technology to drive FirstBank’s services?
As you are probably aware,
First Bank is the leading institution in terms of deployment of technology and
the use of technology to deliver superior banking services to its customers. In
the past few years we have actually focused on what you would call a second
phase of our transformation efforts which started from the Century Two project
that saw us deploying modern technologies way back in the early part of the 21st
century, around 2000 to 2002.
Now, what we have done in the last three years is to focus on a
coordinated transformation of the business with technology again being at the
core of that transformation effort. So, in the last three years, we have
improved our technology infrastructure to generally improve the reliability of
our services across channels; both at the branch and our electronic delivery
channels.
If you relate that to the growth that we’ve also seen in the
numbers that First Bank is churning out, you will see that there is consistency
and a direct correlation between the improvements that we are achieving in the
technology and service delivery space and the customer patronage and growth in
our business both in terms of size or volume and profitability.
Therefore, in the last three years we have doubled our balance
sheet and we have also increased our customer numbers from under 5 million to
over 7 million accounts today and that also has translated into the share of
wallet that we have of each customer. We have also been able to generate a lot
more transactions from our existing customers in that process.
Other statistics that points to the impact of the transformation
of our technology include things like volumes of transactions across electronic
channels and you would see that First Bank leads other providers. We have more
than 30 per cent share of the issued cards volume in the market space and we
also process more than double the volume of transactions of the number 2 bank
on the industry’s payment switching network.
That basically summarizes the impact that technology
transformation has made on First Bank operation in the last few years. I think
I will end that by saying what underscores our usage of technology in First
Bank is the award we got last year which was tagged the Innovation Award from
the Bankers Magazine, that award came out of a number of initiatives but
the core initiative then was the introduction of the biometric ATM. We are the
first bank and still today the only bank that have biometric ATM services,
although we have not extensively rolled-out, but we have deployed it in a
number of our branches.
For the benefit of the ordinary Nigerians, can you give us some
insights to what you mean by biometric ATM?
Rasheed Adegoke
Well, the biometric ATM essentially like any other ATM except that
we have enhanced it with the ability to read fingerprints as an additional
security feature to protect our customers against fraudsters. Basically, what
happens when you go to an ATM today; you need your card and a PIN number.
Although there has been a lot of effort on the part of the industry to improve security
like the change in card standard which is not limited to First Bank alone. It
was an industry wide initiative to move from the Magnetic Stripe card which was
what was initially introduced into the Nigerian market, and which is also a
relatively insecure platform to the Chip and PIN platform, which essentially is
a much more secured card than the Magnetic Stripe card that could easily be
cloned by fraudsters.
So, the industry has done that move, however we at First Bank are
“upping the game” and saying that there are a number of our customers that are
in the rural areas, maybe that’s also because First Bank has the spread that
most other banks do not have, and we have the experience of serving both the
urban rich as well as the rural poor.
Some of the rural masses are not too good with numbers so when you
say they should choose a PIN number, you won’t be surprised if someone chooses
1111 and so, if that person misplaces his or her card, it is very easy for a
fraudster to guess the PIN number, so for such customers you also have to get
their fingerprint with a biometric ATM. That’s the extra level of protection
that we have introduced into the market place.
Most banks in the country presently, including First Bank seems to
fall in line for foreign of IT applications, and from your own perspective,
what would be your rating of local applications in Nigeria, basically?
Well, I will be very frank and objective, treating it like a
balance. I think you would say that we do have skills within the Nigerian market
place to manage IT. We have skills to do software development, however what
tends to happen within the software space itself is that there are various
categories of software, from the system software which are like the operating
systems like Windows, UNIX, and the iOS that runs on Apple platform to business
applications starting from simple human resource management, payroll
applications to very complex systems like the ERPs that manage entire
manufacturing operations or core banking software that are used to run banks.
Now, we are not playing at all in the system software space so we
do not have, for instance, the operating system developed by Nigerians, even
though you might have a few Nigerians contributing to the development of
operating systems because each of the big players like Microsoft do have a
reasonable population of Nigerians within their employ.
We also do have freelance programmers that contribute to open
source software like Linux development and some of them are Nigerians. However,
when it comes to actually having or owning a branded operating system product,
Nigeria is not playing in that space. Now when we come to business application
space we also have a number of Nigerian companies that have played very well in
building human resource applications, small scale ERP solutions, and one
company comes to mind easily, Systemspecs with their human manager application
which have been highly successful by all means.
On enterprise applications, we also have a number of players that
have attempted to play in that space and not all have been equally successful,
but we have some players that have stayed upwards of 20 years in that space so
you would say they have achieved some level of success and again a name that
comes to mind is Computer Systems Associates; they have a core banking software
which has been sold not just within West Africa but also in East Africa and
other emerging markets that actually needs their solution. They have also sold
a version to microfinance banks within Nigeria.
Now coming back to the question of whether Nigerian software
companies have matured to the point of developing robust core banking software,
I would say it’s a yes and no. Yes, to the extent that the basic skills to do
it are there, and I’ve given the examples that prove that those skills are
there if we focus well enough.
However, in terms of mindset, we’re not yet there. Software
business is a long term business, so, you have to make investment for the long
term. Nigerian investors on the contrary are mostly short term investors. So
you don’t go into software with the mindset of getting back your investment in
six months or twelve months. That’s what has actually not made made-in-Nigeria
software to mature to that scale where they can easily compete with internationally
developed applications because if you are investing for the long term, it means
that you need to be able to retain certain skill set for the long-run.
If you have business architects and software architects that are
working within software companies and the turnover of your staff is maybe every
eighteen months, you have to recruit new staff because the good staff have
left, you won’t be able to actually go for the long run and these are some of
the issues that the local software developers or investors are still dealing
with.
On the other hand, you need some level of capitalization to be
able to hold on for that long in terms of being within the software development
line so that you are not hitting the market place with an under-developed
products that you want to start earning from. By and large, if we change our
focus, if we change our investment mindset and focus on software as a long term
business we can actually compete with other internationally developed
applications in Nigeria.
Earlier on, you made mention of First Bank running on Finacle 10,
what was the business decision behind this?
First Bank essentially, has four key drivers of growth or four
pillars of the business strategy; one focus on growth, the second is on
improving service delivery and attaining service excellence, the third is
talent management being able to retain the best talent within the industry and
the fourth is performance management, both at the individual level and the
group level.
If you look at those pillars, central to it is service excellence
because every business exist for one purpose only and that purpose is to
recruit and retain profitable customers, that’s why businesses exist, so if a
business is not able to meet the needs of its customers both now and into future,
that business will not be a sustainable business.
So as a service enterprise, we need to continually improve our
service platform, as you know infrastructure is central to most things. If you
use the nation as an analogy, we are where we are partly because of failure of
infrastructure so one of the key service delivery infrastructure for a bank is
a core banking software, because really a bank’s business if we all think of it
not as much managing money but a bank’s
business is actually managing information.
Whether you are talking about ensuring that you properly keep the
information for 7million accounts and ensure that there is no mix-up in the
management of that information or you ensuring that the information required to
dispense cash at the ATM is readily available for the ATM to work. That’s what
banking is about; it’s about managing information, so we need to continually
improve that platform for managing information which is a core banking
infrastructure.
Presently, we have set aggressive target for ourselves in the area
of service excellence and our existing platform which is the Finacle 7 cannot
continue to serve us to meet those aggressive targets, so we want to be able to
be quicker in introducing new products into the market place, that’s what
Finacle 10 would give us as an edge over Finacle 7. We want to reduce the time
it takes to process the withdrawal transaction, currently we spend an average
of four (4) minutes; a customer will spend not more than four minutes in front
of a teller officer to do a withdrawal transaction, we want to halve that to
two minutes.
Yes, we have improved our infrastructure; our back-end
infrastructure, so our processing facilities are faster, but we also need to
improve on the underlining software that runs the process. We also want to
simplify our processes further in the front end such that the teller spends
less time trying to post transactions and spend more time interacting with the
customer, that will mean some improvement of our core banking infrastructure,
so all of these are the business drivers that has lead us to say we need to
upgrade to Finacle 10, because it’s going to give us much more flexible service
delivery infrastructure that would enable us achieve that level of service
excellence that we set for ourselves.
I would like to know your take on the cash-lite Lagos and eventual
deployment across the country, and what is First Bank’s readiness in the long
run?
First, I would say that the cashless or cash-lite drive is the
right move, we at First Bank have been moving in that direction before CBN
(Central Bank of Nigeria) came up with the policy in order to drive it across
the industry. Which is why, if you go back to my initial summary, some of the
highlights that I made were the investments we made in actually enhancing our
electronic delivery channels which has translated into us, I mean First Bank
achieving a larger share of the market space for electronic transactions.
We had actually been quiet clear with our own strategy as First
Bank in driving towards a cash-lite situation, because we have been trying to
move or migrate our customers to the electronic channels, so that they deal
less with cash. Now, having said that, it’s a good policy, it’s something
that’s going to help the economy because the velocity of transactions will be
much faster if you are using electronic means, and you can imagine that we have
move significantly forward from a situation whereby upcountry clearing was 21
days.
I don’t know if you still remember that there was a time in
Nigeria when it took 21 working days to clear a cheque if that cheque is not a
local cheque and local cheque itself took about a week for you to be able to
get your money to where we are today which is we have a turnaround time on
clearing items which is still T+2 and that has been shortened further to a next
day.
What do you mean by T+2?
T+2 means the day you
submit the cheque for clearing you add two days and on the third day you are
going to get credit in your account but that is being shortened further to a
next day clearing which by next month actually we should be having a taste that
fully. That is what has happened within the clearing system and we have seen
that, that has actually impacted the volumes of transactions that go by the way
of cheques rather than cash exchange.
Also, what has happened which we didn’t note is that it was like a
first phase of the movement towards less cash because if it takes 21 days for
you to get value for money, you would hardly do any transaction through that
channel. Now, what debit card have done, because debit card by their nature are
actually cheque replacements because cheques are instruments by which you
access your account; debit cards are also instruments by which you access your
account for payment.
With the introduction and wide-spread adoption of debit cards, we
actually have gotten a faster mode of rendering payment which doesn’t even have
to go through clearing, so you could say you have instant clearing with debit
cards. So, if I actually want to transfer money to you, if I have a portal that
allows me to debit my account using the security on my debit card and transfer
money to your own account, then I would basically be giving instantaneous
credit into your account, so that’s like instant settlement, what CBN has done
is to try to focus us on that platform, the cash-lite policy is essentially
trying to focus us on the efficiency of the platform that is built around the
card and the mobile payment which it has also introduced a license for, and
which are all instant settlement platform.
Essentially, what we do with exchange instrument is largely payment,
exchange of value so if we are able to do payment faster, transaction velocity
increases and therefore we can actually ensure that the economy becomes a lot
more productive. One of the reasons which CBN has also used as a justification
for the policy which is a valid reason, is the sheer cost or waste that is
going into handling cash because we all know how much it takes to print one
naira note and if you are frequently using it, you need to replace the note
more frequently, that’s a cost that goes into CBN’s account. Besides that the
bank that handle cash needs to employ people to do the cash counting and they
need to pay insurance to secure the cash that is held in their vault, we know
the risk of armed robbery in the country and some time the loss of lives that is
associated with the easy access to cash.
So, as a policy, we agree that’s the way it should go and what we
are doing at First Bank is that we are ensuring that as you adopt the
alternatives to cash, you basically do not get services that are less than what
you will get with the use of cash.
Our platforms are very reliable, we have moved from less than
2,000 active Point of Sale (PoS) terminals to over 8,000 that we have deployed
and we do intend that by the end of the year, First Bank alone will have
deployed more than 20,000 PoS is we are looking at focusing on Lagos area.
Across the country we will be talking of bigger numbers, but we are focusing on
Lagos because the focus this year even by the industry is really around Lagos,
so we are focusing on Lagos and we are saying that Lagos can really take that
depth of PoS deployment. There are a lot of places we go, all we do is go to
the nearby ATM, withdraw cash so that we can pay at the point of sale, why do
we need to go through that when you can swipe your card at the point of sale
and actually get value.
Why is it that some of the PoS are not working?
Those are the problems that we had initially, because the industry
had not focused on that. You know, there was also a time that an average bank’s
branch, the chances are that the network would be down was high, or if you go
to the bank’s ATM the chances that the ATM would not be online was high but
when we focused on that as an industry you see that those cases are very
remote; it’s not perfect right now but they are remote because most banks have
multiple links, most ATMs have multiple links and the same thing is happening
to the PoS right now where you have PoS that are deployed before having only a
single connectivity, today we are having PoS that have multiple connectivity,
multiple GPRS – Global Packet Radio Service, and all of that.
What causes some of the hiccups in transactions from time to time,
especially on the issue of ATM, from your professional perspective?
You talked about challenges, we cannot operate within a vacuum, we
know the state of infrastructure within the country, a lot of what we are doing
right now has to ride on the infrastructure that we have; communication links,
unreliable electricity.
If you actually want to run a branch that you would have an ATM
and that ATM needs to be available for 24-7, it means that even when the branch
has closed there must be power that is powering the ATM, we have gone ahead to
install inverters to protect those equipments and ensure that there is power
around the clock, so having put that background there, you would understand
that there is some point of failure that could actually arise, what tends to
happen is that we do have sometimes the communication links for instance in the
middle of an ATM transaction so a customer has slotted in the card and the pin,
and the transaction was about to take place and there is a failure of
communications.
What the ATM has been trained to do is that it would actually
reverse the transaction that has just failed because before parting with money,
the ATM will debit the account to be sure the money exist and then dispenses
money to you. However, let’s assume that the ATM had debited your account and
the link fails, the ATM will wait for an acknowledgement that the debit has
actually happen and then it doesn’t get, so it would return your card and also
automatically it would raise a credit back into your account. We all experience
it and I’m sure you have also experienced it.
If you are a First Bank customer and I hope you are, what happens
is if you slot in your card and have failed transactions you would get two
alerts almost at the same time, you will get the debit alert and you will get
the credit alert immediately, which shows that there is no human being manually
reversing the transactions because the system itself is automated to know that
something has failed and to credit you back with your money.
However, sometimes that automatic process doesn’t kick in and
that’s why we set up a dispute resolution mechanism which ensures that within
24 hours after such incidence of failure of the automatic reversal, someone in
the back office is able to credit you back, so there is not any instance that
we know, for instance, at First Bank and I believe across the industry really
that someone’s account has been debited and the money is not been credited back
except where people have been defrauded, because we are aware of cases of
people losing possession of their cards or compromising their PIN, and in such
cases there are also incomplete transactions on those account.
I am sure you know that bulk of electronic transactions rides on
networks, which in-turn depends on Internet Protocols (IPs) to deliver,
therefore what are banks doing on migration, especially are we looking forward
to having FBN as the first Nigerian bank to hook to IP version 6?
Let’s first define the IPv4 and v6, essentially the Internet
Protocol version 4, let’s keep it simple is just an addressing scheme, just
like you going into a street in Lagos and you will see old number 5, new number
16, IPv4 and IPv6 are numbering schemes. IPv6 was introduced because the
address space on IP version 4 was actually now more or less fully used because
of the rapid growth of the internet when countries like China started trooping
in and rapidly acquiring internet addresses.
Now, it doesn’t mean that all the addresses on IPv4 becomes
invalid, there is no organization that is getting shut down because they are on
IP version 4, and there is a transition plan that would actually allow people
to have both IPv4 and IPv6 work side by side. So for my internal network for
instance, I probably do not need to change the addressing scheme to IP version
6, because the number of devices and equipments that I have on my internal
network can still be managed with IPv4. And as it is today, even today on the
IP version 4 addresses are still able to communicate with any other hosts,
right, because there is that transition management process that has been set up
for a transition into IP version 6.
So, we do have a plan for a transition to IP version 6 but is
really not something that is going to give us any particular edge. It is not
something as you would say is quite strategic; it is not something that is
going to give us an edge. Everybody will ultimately transit to IPv6 if we
stretch into the very long future so but it’s not something we need to rush
into, we do have a plan to ensure that there is clearly no disruption to our
business due to the adoption of IPv6.
What would be your advice to Nigerians, especially First Bank
customers and what’s First Bank doing in providing facilities like loan for
Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and encouraging those in the IT sector?
When we began, I told you that First Bank basically have the
broadest operation in Nigeria serving the very rich and large institutional
customers to the rural poor and how do we do that, we have our business
structured around segments, so the SMEs would fall under our retail segment and
we do have a group which happen to be the largest group accounting for about 50
per cent of our balance sheet which is actually the retail group, for them to
be 50 per cent of our balance sheet, means that we are actually lending to
them.
If you look at all the key sectors, First Bank is not just playing
there but we are also leading even in lending within those sectors. If you look
at agriculture, First Bank is one of the few banks that got the CBN
intervention fund and that’s because of the quality of lending that we are
doing within the agriculture sector and the fact that we have demonstrated to
CBN that we have the processes to actually understand and support that sector.
If you look at telecoms, when the telecoms industries took off
with advent of Global System for Mobile (GSM) communications, most people
didn’t believe in it; we were one of the first players in that space, not just
lending to the operators but also lending to their distributors and those in
the downstream of the telecoms operations.
Any
sector you look at, especially the SMEs that you are talking about, we are
basically very strong players there, as First Bank. But when you look at the
group it even get more interesting, because we do have First Funds, which also
provides what you could call seed capital type of investment. It’s more like I
won’t call it a straight venture capital vehicle but is close to it, we do take
equity investment in some of the SMEs that have proven that they have a viable
business plan that’s through First funds because you need to appraise those
funds differently from the way you appraise loans. Then, we have the
microfinance, the FBN Microfinance that also caters to the everyday rural
business person that needs N50,000 in order to be able to move tomatoes from
Mile 12 to Ajangbadi and have a viable business. So, we cater to the lowest of
the SMEs and also we cater to the large customers.
Internet
Protocol (IP) addresses are the unique numeric identifiers assigned to every
computer or device that is connected to the Internet. So while we use names,
for example, www.icann.org, to identify ICANN’s website, the computers
themselves don’t actually talk to the name, they talk to the unique number
associated with that name. That number is the IP address.
The
original Internet Protocol, IPv4, was developed in the early 1980s and served
the global Internet community for more than three decades. IPv4 had a capacity
of just over four billion IP addresses, which was enough for the experiment
that the Internet started as in the 1980s. But IPv4 is a finite space, and
after years of rapid Internet expansion, the pool of available unallocated
addresses for IPv4 has been fully allocated to Internet services providers
(ISPs) and users.
Only
3.7 billion IPv4 addresses are usable by ordinary Internet access devices. The
others are used for special protocols, like IP Multicasting. Today, none of
those 3.7 billion IPv4 addresses remain unallocated.
There
are almost seven billion people on the planet, and many of those people want to
have more than one device that has network connectivity. That’s why we need
IPv6, the next generation of the Internet protocol that has a massively bigger
address space than IPv4. Compared to IPv4’s 32-bit address space of four
billion addresses, IPv6 has a 128-bit address space, which is 340 undecillion addresses—that’s
not a number you hear every day!
Over
the past year, major content providers and access networks have started
offering IPv6 services to ordinary Internet users.
Because
IPv6 is so large, it should last us considerably longer than the 30 years we
have gotten so far got from IPv4. ISPs generally assign many thousands of
network segments, called a /64, to a single subscriber connection at home,
school, or business. Giving every person on Earth a connection with a /48 would
barely dent the available IPv6 address space.
In
fact, while the Earth’s orbit around the Sun is only big enough to contain
3,262 Earths, it would take 21,587,961,064,546 Earths like ours to use all the
addresses in the part of the IPv6 space we now use. That's a lot of addresses
for a rapidly growing Internet!
What Do IP Addresses Look Like?
Those
numbers in IPv4, the fourth version of the Internet protocol, look like this: 192.0.2.53.
IPv6 addresses are written in hexadecimal, which can fit more information into
fewer digits. Colons separate the segments of IPv6 addresses instead of dots; for
example, 2001:0db8::53. In fact, when you see two colons side by side in an
IPv6 address, you know that all the segments between them contain only zeros.
You would have to expand the example address to 2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0053
without those colons.
How are IPv6 Addresses Distributed?
IP
addresses are distributed in a hierarchical system. As the Internet Assigned
Numbers Authority (IANA) functions operator, ICANN allocates IP addresses to
the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) around the world, and the RIRs
then allocate smaller IP address blocks to ISPs and other network operators.
From
there, the ISPs and other Internet operators assign the addresses to the individual
Internet connections used by most computer users.
ICANN’s
Board of Directors ratified the policy governing the allocation of IPv6 address
space to RIRs in September 2006. The key policy elements are:
·RIRs receive IPv6 blocks in /12 units
·RIRs can receive an additional block when they
have used 50 percent of their existing allocation.
·The number of /12 units RIRs receive is based
on a formula established by IANA.
What is a /12 unit?
A
/12 is a block 1,048,576 times the size of the minimum allocation made by RIRs
to ISPs and other network operators. Some ISPs run very large networks and
receive blocks thousands of times larger than the minimum, but a /12 allows for
at least tens of thousands of allocations to organizations running networks before
the block is fully allocated.
To
give you a sense of how many IP addresses are in a /12 block: All five RIRs
were allocated a /12 of IPv6 address space in 2006. As of the end of 2010, none
of them had requested additional address space.
The Policy details
The
IPv6 policy contains a formula for determining when an RIR qualifies for additional
IPv6 address space and how much it can receive. To qualify for additional IPv6 address
space, the RIR must have less than 50 percent of a /12 left, or it must not
have enough space to meet its members’ needs for the coming nine months.
Defining the variables
The
variables in the policy’s formula are available space and necessary space. All
an RIR’s IPv6 address space is considered available for allocation unless it is
a reservation that will expire within the next three months, or is fragmented.
The
policy’s formula considers recent history and future projects to determine how
much address space an RIR might need in the future. The formula works this way:
First, simple averaging is used to determine the number of addresses allocated
per month during the past six months. This average helps determine how much
space an RIR is expected to need in the near term. If the RIR’s available spaceis not enough for the next nine months of
allocations, the RIR qualifies for additional address space.
Special needs
The
policy also allows special facts to be taken into account when calculating how
much additional IPv6 address space an RIR qualifies to receive. They might
apply if there was a new regional policy or external factors “such as new infrastructure,
new services within the region, technological advances or legal issues.”
In
all cases, the RIR must explain the change in consumption rate or the impact of
the new policy, or must provide an analysis of the external factors. If an
RIR’s data is not sufficiently clear, it can be questioned.
The calculation
Once
this information is collected, the calculation can go forward:
Necessary Space=Average Number of
Addresses Allocated Monthly during the Past 6 Months x Length of Period in
Months
Although
each RIR provides all these data to ICANN’s IANA Department with its request, most
of the data are published every day in a standard format log file, and are
mirrored on the IANA FTP site. But whether the calculation is done by ICANN
staff or by an observer, using the data published by the RIRs makes calculating
the results simple. The numbers can be entered in a spreadsheet that calculates
how much space the RIR qualifies for based on the formula.
Who Sets These Policies?
These
distribution policies are developed in the RIRs’ regional public policy forums.
The process is very similar to the consensus-based, bottom-up approach used to
develop other ICANN policies, which are typically guided by ICANN’s supporting
organizations. The RIRs allocate addresses to ISPs and other network operators
according to the policies developed in these public policy forums in which representatives
from industry, governments and civil society participate.
These
forums are open to participation by anyone with access to email. Discussions
happen via open, archived mailing lists and at open meetings. RIR membership is
not required to fully participate in the policy development process. Any
individual can submit a global policy proposal. The proposal can be submitted
to an individual RIR’s policy-making process, like any other regional policy
proposal, or they can be submitted directly to the Address Supporting
Organization Address Council (ASO AC). The ASO AC is the body that makes sure a
global policy proposal has properly reached consensus in all five RIR regions
before the proposal is sent to the ICANN Board of Directors to be ratified.
Are the Internet and its technology
ready for the transition to IPv6?
Most
of the existing systems that we are using today actually support IPv6 already.
So the laptops that we have in front of us support IPv6 and have done so for
quite some time. IPv6 is not dramatically different on the network from IPv4,
and those machines that we were using 30 years ago were capable of IPv4. So if
the kind of computers that were running thirty years ago could run IPv4, then
pretty much any cell phone (or probably pocket calculator) could run IPv6
today, if you really wanted it to.
How can I get IPv6 connectivity?
If
you’re an average home user, it’s up to your ISP to initiate the transition
from IPv4 to IPv6 on your network. In most cases, you won’t have to do anything.
If you are required to change something, such as your Internet router, your ISP
will let you know.
Which RIR runs the open policy forum for
my region?
Ericsson has unveiled its router with
multi-dimensional scalability which is in the Smart Services Router 8000
family, tagged ‘SSR 8010.’
A press statement made available to DigitalSENSE News,
quoted the Head of Product Area IP & Broadband, Ericsson, Jan Häglund, saying
that SSR 8010 offers flexibility in capacity planning, lower total cost of
ownership and energy efficiency.
Additionally, he said, SSR 8010 allows concurrent
scalability in data plane and control plane, as well as the ability to add the
most demanding applications.
Ericsson’s SSR 8000 family also offers operators
complete flexibility to design their networks with both centralized and
distributed architectures.
According to him, the launch of its SSR 8010 Smart
Services Router (SSR), the latest addition to the SSR 8000 family and a key
component of its portfolio of 4th-generation Internet Protocol (IP) networking
solutions launched in 2011.
The portfolio, he noted is ideal for mobile and fixed
IP backhaul that can aggregate 2G, 3G, 4G and fixed access traffic.
He pointed out that the SSR 8010 which will be
commercially available in Q3 2012, is a 10-slot that complements the 20-slot
SSR 8020, thereby enabling operators to deploy the SSR family in different
parts of the network: IP Edge and aggregation.
He explained that the SSR 8010 consumes only 3.3 watts
per gigabit of traffic throughput and is best suited for applications where 10
available slots will be optimal to meet current capacity and upcoming growth –
for example in metro networks. Capacity planning will drive the decision and a
customer can deploy both 8010 and 8020 nodes in the same network.
He emphasised that the SSR 8010’s smaller footprint
provides additional flexibility for operators to deploy networks with
distributed architectures.
“The introduction of the SSR 8010 highlights
Ericsson’s ongoing focus on developing 4th-generation IP solutions that can
scale in multiple dimensions – data,
control and service. Given we anticipate that the traffic between data centers
and end users will quadruple to close to 1,000 exabytes annually by 2016,
demand for smart solutions of this type is expected to be strong,” he said.
