NOTA BENE: The previous announcement contained some errors that were corrected in the following text.
More than one thousand IPv6 address prefixes have been allocated to organizations in Latin America and the Caribbean. This was announced by the manager of the Engineering Department at the Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry (LACNIC), Arturo Servin, during a panel of experts at the 43rd ICANN meeting that took place in San Jose, Costa Rica, from 11 to 16 March, 2012.
He also noted that with more than 1000 prefixes with IPv6 addresses we reached a coverage of 42% of current members around the region with the new address system. Brazil is leading this growth where 46% of its members already have at least one address allocation with this new protocol. "This is a great step for the community as a whole; it shows that we are on the right track, and that National Registries NIC.br and NIC.MX are playing a major role", said LACNIC's Engineering Manager.
These efforts on the part of both the community and LACNIC aimed at quickly expanding the new technology in the region must continue and increase, so that those who have not yet received IPv6 addresses can have access to them and continue to grow and provide new services.
Arturo Servin highlighted the fact that the upcoming LACNIC meeting in Quito "will focus on IPv6 deployment, with activities such as the meeting with technology managers and CTOs that will allow us to advance in terms of knowledge and commitment on the part of the region's major stakeholders towards effective deployment."
About IPv4 and IPv6
- The explosive growth of the Internet has generated a huge demand for available blocks of IP addresses – a unique number assigned to each device connected to a network – which has forced a new protocol to be developed to allow the expansion of the World Wide Web. IPv4, the system currently most widely in use, allows a finite number of IP addresses – more than 4 billion possible combinations that are now reaching exhaustion. In order to replace it, IPv6, a protocol that allows connecting a vastly larger number of devices to the Internet, was created.
LACNIC currently anticipates that the region will have IPv4 addresses until the first quarter of 2014, but this forecast might change dramatically with the increasing growth of mobile Internet and the adoption of new devices.
