The Malawi Research and Education Network (MAREN) will again make its presence felt at TNC, the  networking conference of the European research and education network, GEANT, TNC23, to be held in Tirana, Albania from 5– 9 June 2023.

MAREN’s nominated candidate, Alexius Chipalamwazani is scheduled to present a lightning talk at the conference under GEANT’s  Emerging NREN Programme (ENP) which aims at fostering global knowledge sharing  through the integration of research and education networks around the globe. 

The ENP is supported by the European Union funded AfricaConnect3 project which funds participants from emerging NRENs that would not be able to support their participation at the prestigious conference.

Chipalamwazani, who is the Network and Infrastructure Manager at MAREN, will present on the state of the World’s top Universities and popular Academic Content providers to Malawi’s public universities in migration to IPv6 and the role of NRENs in helping academic institutions adopt the new IP address space which facilitates research and innovation owing to its ability to support new applications.  

The Network and Infrastructure Manager will become the second representative from MAREN to speak at TNC. In 2019, MAREN’s representative Akuzike Banda delivered a lightning talk at TNC19 held in Tallin, Estonia.

Speaking after being selected to speak at the conference, Chipalamwazani expressed excitement at the opportunity which he believes is a great platform for knowledge exchange.

‘I am obviously excited to present at TNC. I look forward to learn from hundreds of academics, engineers and policy makers who will attend this global conference. I believe our research results are worth sharing with the community and that we can learn some best practices from our counterparts who have excelled in deploying IPv6 for their institutions,’ said Chipalamwazani.

According to the manager, the project, which he conducted alongside MAREN CEO, Solomon Dindi and Mwiza Mhango, sampled 427 top ranked universities in 2023 to determine their activation of DNS, web and email services on IPv6. The project also looked at 143 commonly accessed journals by three Malawian public Universities to determine the journal’s activation of IPv6.