APNIC to meet in New Zealand

Stuart Corner
Monday, 10 September 2007 07:45

Your IT - Home IT

The Internet Society of New Zealand (InternetNZ) is to host in August 2008 a meeting of the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), the Regional Internet Registry for the Asia Pacific region representing 56 economies.

APNIC is responsible for allocating Asia Pacific IP addresses, AS (Autonomous System) numbers, and "in-addr.arpa" domain delegations. The meeting, to be held in Christchurch will be APNIC's first meeting in New Zealand.

InternetNZ Councillor Jonny Martin, said: "APNIC meetings focus mainly on policy development issues and information sharing. It's likely there will be some interesting address allocation issues discussed, such as the finite number of IPv4 resources we have left."
 
In June New Zealand took its first steps towards implementing IPv6, the new greatly expanded Internet addressing scheme that will replace IPv4. NZRS (.nz Registry Services) upgraded is .nz name servers - ns8.dns.net.nz and ns9.dns.net.nz, located in Wellington and Albany respectively - to support IPv6 addresses. Both are connected to the NZ IPv6 Internet Exchange. NZRS has also introduced an IPv6 capable Whois server accessible at whois.ipv6.srs.net.nz.

Prior to this there had been little progress towards IPv6 in New Zealand. NZRS general manager, Nick Griffin, told iTWire at the time "our shareholder InternetNZ is keen to get some momentum behind IPv6 and in the past 12 months there have been discussions among the network operators, but at present there is a lack of commercial IPv6 transit."

August 2008 will also see APAN (the Asia Pacific Advanced Network organisation) meet in Queenstown. Hosted by REANNZ (Research and Education Advanced Network New Zealand), the bi-annual APAN meeting is being held from August 4 - 8, 2008 and will showcase a range of advanced network applications.