AFRINIC Activities Update  
 




[background conversation]

00:12 Alan Barrett: Okay, I've figured out how to use the remote with some help. Right. Okay so on the finance side in previous years we've maintained the accounts of the company in Mauritian Rupees. However most of the operational income and expenditure has been denominated in US dollars, so last year there was a decision taken by the board under advice from the members to convert the accounts to US dollars, that's now been full implemented. So as of 2014 the accounts are all kept in US dollars. We had an income of about 3.9 million, expenses also pretty close to 3.9 million but a surplus of $20,000 in operations and it was also a gain from interest and foreign exchange conversions, which resulted in the total surplus for the year being about $50,000. We have at the end of 2014 a little more than $1 million cash equivalents on hand. So as you can see that's equivalent to about one quarter of our annual expenses.

01:35 Alan Barrett: On the human resource side as of the end of 2014 we had a head count of 42 staff members, during the year eight left and 12 joined. At the previous year Adiel Akplogan left as of the end of January 2015. He announced his departure a few months before and so of course during 2014 there was a lot of work on the HR side to prepare for recruitment of the new CEO and I was eventually given that job.

02:16 Alan Barrett: Member Services includes both Registration Service and Customer Services. So Registration Service is when you apply for IP Address Space or AS Numbers and that kind of thing. Customer Service is when you already have it, you're already a member but you need assistance with something. So both these are grouped together under Member Services. There are five dedicated full-time staff between these two sections. The Member Services has an ISO 9001 Certification. There's a new version of the new member registration process to allow members, that is to allow new members to register themselves through a web interface and there's some paper work as well but much of it is done through the web portal.

03:13 Alan Barrett: Okay, IPv6 has been added to my AFRINIC just to make it easier to deal with IPv6 information. Okay. Improvements in the registration service process, we are considering a service level commitment. As I mentioned in response to a question earlier today, in another session I... No, was it this session? There is currently no service level agreement between AFRINIC and its members. We're governed by the Registration Service Agreement, we are considering adding some kind of service level commitment. Informally we already have guidelines that we try to respond to requests within two working days but we're thinking of formalizing that. Okay, we've... The Member Services has also been involved in updating RIR government documents. The NRO, which is the group which provides collaboration between the five Regional Internet Registries has been collecting information on the governance of the RIRS. Member Services has been involved with providing that.

04:27 Alan Barrett: Here are some statistics, I'm not going to read through all of them. But as of May 2015 we had about 1,200 members. About 63 new members joined during the first few months of 2015 since AFRINIC started in 2005 we've issued 75 million IPv4 addresses and 3.6 million/32s of... No, that doesn't seem right. I think there's a mistake there. Anyway we've issued IPv4 and IPv6 address... Oh, right IPv6 is on the next slide. We have a stock of about 2.7/8 equivalents, that amounts to about 45 million IPv4 addresses in stock available for allocation. Some of those are reserved in terms of the policies that have been passed. So you can see that our stock is a bit less than what we've already allocated over the last 10 years.

05:40 Alan Barrett: We've allocated more than a 1000 autonomous system numbers since we started. Then on the IPv6 side 470 IPv6 prefixes during the course of operation since 2005, 30 of those are this year. About 36% of our members have IPv6 prefixes, that's 436 out of about 1,200. And 90% of our new members responded to our survey which said they were satisfied with the handling of their first request. Moving onto IT and engineering, the projects that they've been involved in are infrastructure resiliency. We've installed virtualization environments in our main data centers in Mauritius and Johannesburg. So when you need to spin out a new machine for some purpose, instead of needing hardware, we can often do that in a virtual machine.

06:47 Alan Barrett: We have Mauritius and Johannesburg and we're also adding something in Cape Town. Then we have a data recovery strategy which is in progress. We would like to improve our resilience to equipment failure, and also human error. These are some of the services that the IT and engineering team have been active with. On the DNS side, we have the African server copy program. We provide support for copies of the L-Root survey. I believe right now there are two of them, there is an agreement between AFRINIC and ICANN in terms of which will provide this.

07:39 Alan Barrett: We have a DNS support program where important domain names like country code top level domains are able to get AFRINIC operate a secondary server for them, and we have 26 ccTLDs participating. New Member Registration portal, it's basically a new version of the website where new members can register themselves. That was deployed last year. New version of RPKI, that's a crypto thing to allow ISPs to assign their routing announcements. New version of the routing registry is still in progress. New version of the Whois service is in progress, and also implementation of RDAP, that's an API for remote access to the Whois directory and similar things. That's also a plan.

08:47 Alan Barrett: The next department is Capacity Building. This is a new department created in November 2014. A lot of its work is training and there was previously a training section but it's now being renamed to 'Capacity Building' and it has a slightly wider role. It's been involved with training on IPv6 and number resource management. Slides have been developed for these new training sessions. The goal is to hold several training sessions, several sites have been identified where they plan to hold training. And this year, we've done four training sessions in Mauritius, South Africa, Benin and Tunisia... Sorry Cotonou. And about 12 more are planned. We have even dates set for when these training sessions will be held.

09:57 Alan Barrett: The Research and Innovation side, that's also a new department set up in September. It's been working on RPKI which the tech team will install, but the research team is developing. It's been working on a DNSSEC zone signer. The long going project called Airs which is for measuring and creating statistics for resource consumption and routing statistics in Africa. We have an MOU with RIPE in which we distribute RIPE Atlas Probes and we also run RIPE Atlas Anchor. You can hear more about these in... I think there was a session on a different date about RIPE Atlas. And also the Research and Innovation Team wants to participate in IETF working groups.

10:53 Alan Barrett: Okay. Thank you. That was very brief. Tomorrow morning, there will also be an update from the departments on their activities. That is outside...