Sunday 16th September marked the 30th anniversary of the first IPv4 assignment in Africa. In 1988, Rhodes University was assigned the class C network 192.42.99.0/24 by Sue Romano of the Stanford Research Institute — the assignment predates the later Internet registries for Africa operated respectively by InterNIC, ARIN and AfriNIC. Rhodes' assignment, which is still in active use, is first documented in RFC1117, prior to any other recorded in AfriNIC's database.
TENET also holds early number resources: our autonomous system number, AS2018, is the lowest AS number still in active use in Africa (it's also coincidentally, the current year). However, the Uninet Project, TENET's precursor was assigned AS1228 way back in 1991 — again a first in Africa.
Moving forward, in 2005 TENET was allocated the IPv6 prefix of 2001:4200::/32, the second such assignment in South Africa and the fourth in Africa. A number of the institutions we serve, including Rhodes, have been running IPv6 in production on their networks for over a decade.
Universities in South Africa have a long history of being leaders in African Internet adoption, and as IPv6 adoption becomes more important, we're well placed to ensure our beneficiary institutions are ahead of the curve.
