Tunisia switches to “next generation” Internet Protocol

TUNISIAONLINENEWS- Technology

 The national commission in charge for the migration towards Internet Protocol Version IPV6 held its first meeting on September 13, 2009 in Tunis.

IPV6 is the  ”next generation” protocol designed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to replace the current Internet Protocol version (”IPv4″).

The new  Internet Layer Protocol for packed-switched internetworks, is endowed with a larger address space (128-bits) than IPv4 (32 bits). The new protocol will  provide the country  with sufficient capacity to  host Internet addresses and meet growing  internet needs.
The meeting was held under the aegis of Mr El Hadj Gley the Minister of CommunicationTechnologies  with the presence of secretary of state in charge of information technology, Internet and free software Mrs Lamia Chaffai Seghaier and the participation of members of the commission issued from the concerned public bodies, Internet services suppliers and telecommunications network operators.

During the meeting , the commission focused on the implementation of  an action plan in Tunisia  to ensure  the success of this migration regarding equipments and networks, applications and electronic systems, trainers’ training and awareness.

The national commission aims at helping national organizations to better choose the methodology adapted to the information technology applications linked to the new Internet Protocol Version.

The international Internet network capacity was increased to reach 15 Gbit/s late July 2009 compared to 5 Gbit/s in the same period in 2008.

Until late July 2009, the number of Internet users in Tunisia grew to 3.14 million compared to 2.4 million users in July 2008.

Tunisia was recently ranked fifth among Arab countries, in terms of the Internet download speed with 1.4 MB and eleventh  among 19 Arab World countries in terms of connectivity with an overall  rate of 128%.