On Fri, 29 Oct 2004, Jeff Williams wrote: > Thank you Jon for your explanation. I now have the > understanding I thought I had but was taken back by ARIN having > one allocation policy for minimal allocations and AFriNIC having > another in that AFriNIC is in part somehow connected to both RIPE > and ARIN, so than AFriNIC elected to go with a lower allocation. > Still one has to wonder as to why AFriNIC went that way as it in > some ways doesn't make good sense... Perhaps that was due to > political pressure? There was no politics involved. The community requested for this at the ISPA i-week meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa last year. Below is partly the text that was in that proposal: The economies of Africa and those of other countries in the ARIN region (United States and Canada) are not of the same scale. The number of Internet users inside Africa is much fewer than in the other countries in the ARIN region. Whereas it may be reasonable to expect that the user numbers in North America support an ISP's ability to meet the current ARIN IPv4 criteria, it is not reasonable in Africa. Unable to meet the current criteria to obtain IPv4 address space from ARIN, and unable to obtain adequate address space from upstream providers; African ISPs must resort to solutions such as NAT, or sometimes are simply not able to provide services to customers due to the lack of IPv4 address space. Lack of adequate IPv4 address space may be slowing down the growth and development of the Internet in Africa. regards, Ernest.