are y'all ready for this gift?
--bill
I'm kinda fearing this in South Africa, as we have a few large incumbents who aren't really driving -NG versions of protocols.
They also have a "prove to us it's broken, and we may look at it in a few months' time"-attitude towards it. 
So 32-bit ASNs and IPv6 equally aren't really being driven, apart from by a few key Academic players.
Just my ZAR 0.02
-H.
That would be why 32-bit ASNs have been "requestable" for the last couple of
years(?); you could have been prodding providers with "it doesn't work, fix
it" for a while now.
- Matt
I'll point out that there really isn't any alternative at this point. This approach
will issue 16-bit compatible ASNs as long as they last. Once they're gone,
it's not like there was some new 16-bit compatible alternative.
Owen
Although I realise that, the problem in South Africa is that we essentially still have a Telecoms Monopoly: The local loop belongs to Telkom SA who also competes with ISPs in providing Internet access to clients, so growth in the ISP sector is stunted. There are only really a handful of other NSPs who service ISPs and those ISPs still have no access to the networking segment from Datacenter to DSLAM.
The major hope in .ZA is the unbundling of the local loop around 2012. Until then, there's no real end in sight (apart from mobile access, which is being stunted in many senses by the Communications Authority). ISPs just don't have that kind of prodding power in this country yet 
And the bad news is that I hear our incumbent Telecoms operator is expanding further up the continent, so that their legacy of incompetence may remain for a while.
But we will continue pushing for these (legacy-)new technologies. 
One day we will prevail! 
-H.
There was always similar issues in .ZW as well (when it was marginally more stable).
Jack