TENET returns six IP addresses to AfriNIC

SIX Internet Protocol (IPv4) addresses have been returned to the African Internet Numbers Registry (AfriNIC) by the Tertiary Education Network (TENET).

IPv4 is version 4 of the Internet Protocol (IP) and was the first version of the IP to be widely deployed, and forms the basis for most of the current Internet as of 2004, according to Wikipedia.com.

On the other hand, AfriNIC was on April 8 at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) board meeting, adopted as the new and fifth Regional Internet Registry (RIR) to serve Africa and the Indian Ocean.

This followed a report presented by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) on AfriNIC’s application sent to ICANN in September 2004, which met stipulated requirements for the establishment of a new RIR.

AfriNIC which has since joined the Numbers Resource Organisation (NRO) recently announced that the three RIRs previously serving the AfriNIC region namely, American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the Réseaux IP Européens - Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) and the Asia Pacific and Indian Ocean Network Information Centre (APNIC); have transferred all RIR services to it with the latest coming from TENET, a Local Internet Registry (LIR).

Before now, TENET in playing its role as a LIR, has responsibility for six blocks of IPv4 address spaces, comprising 192.96.0.0/16; 196.6.0.0/16; 196.10.0.0/16; 196.11.0.0/16; 196.13.0.0/16 and 198.54.0.0/16.

Confirming this news, the chief executive of AfriNIC Limited, Adiel A. Akplogan said, the organization, a non-profit making entity has taken over the responsibility for these blocks from TENET and has updated its whois database accordingly.

He said that no current assignments from these blocks to any end user organisation would be affected by this change, acknowledging that AfriNIC would respect the portability of such assignments, if any.

“To perform its role as a registry, AfriNIC would contact holders of prefixes in the related blocks in order to get the correct contact information so that these assignments could be properly registered in the public whois database,” he explained.

TENET remains the Local Internet Registry responsible for the blocks 196.21.0.0/16 and 196.24.0.0/16.

Assignments from these blocks are not portable in the hands of assignee organisations, as route announcements to all addresses in these blocks are combined within TENET’s ASN 2018.

The CEO further explained that by way of background, the six blocks aforementioned were originally allocated by the then Internic to TENET’s predecessor organisation, the UNINET Project of the then Foundation for Research Development.

He pointed out that over the years many assignments, mostly small ones, were made to organisations throughout South Africa without regard to the type of organisation, locality or aggregatability of routes.