On 14 September 2012, the RIPE NCC essentially ran out of IPv4 addresses. They began to allocate IPv4 address space from the last /8 of IPv4 address with a very restrictive policy. Next in turn is ARIN. ARIN’s supply of IPv4 addresses is expected to last about 1 year.

Read RIPE’s announcement here

The top stories for 2010 was that some major sites and ISPs turned on IPv6. What was the top 10 IPv6 and IPv4 depletion stories for 2011? Did I miss any significant story? Please comment.

1. IANA runs out of IPv4 addresses
In February 2011, IANA runs out of addresses. This was much earlier than most people predicted. People start to realize that they must start looking into IPv6.

2. APNIC runs out of IPv4 addresses
In April, just two months after IANA runs out of IPv4 addresses it is the first RIRs turn. APNIC serving Asia Pacific and Asia is down to their last /8 and the more restricted policy stats to take effect. They can no longer allocate IPv4 addresses the conventional way.

3. IPv4 addresses for sale
Microsoft aquires a large chunk of addresses from what is left of Nortel. They pay $11.25 per address. People are scratching their heads woundering why Microsoft just didn’t go to ARIN and request the addresses.

4.World IPv6 day
On 8 June, 2011, ISP’s and content providers joined together and turned on IPv6 for a day. The event was a success and very fee issues were found. This attest that IPv6 is ready for prime time.

5. Decrease in IPv4 allocation rate
The allocation rate of IPv4 slows down after APNIC’s depletion. More restrictive policies are in place at the RIR’s and we have not seen and really large allocations in either ARIN or RIPE.

6. Godaddy enables IPv6 DNS
Godaddy enables IPv6 for their DNS servers. 25% of the domains in the world are all of the sudden accessible over IPv6. (Note, that this relates to DNS servers, the web hosting service at Godaddy is still on “Internet classic”)

7. The realization that dual stack networks brokenness is minimal
World IPv6 day and other measurement efforts around the web concludes that the worries about IPv6 brokenness are exaggerated. It can be concluded that turning on IPv6 will not cause any significant loss in website viewers for most companies.

8. Vendor support
With the depletion of IANA and APNIC a lot of vendors jump on the IPv6 bandwagon. Most Firewall, Load balancer, DNS, etc vendors are issuing press releases about how they now support IPv6. They interesting questions will be if the support is as good as they claim.

9. Lack of IPv6 strategies from some large organizations
Just like in 2010. Some large organizations still seems to lack an Ipv6 strategy. Did they read the news at all?

10. Nokia ditches Symbian
Nokia changes strategy and ditches SymbianOS. This creates problems for the Wireless Carriers with Ipv6 plans, since symbian actually had the best IPv6 support of all phone platforms.

© 2011 – Stephan Lagerholm (ipv4depletion.com)

At Nanog 52 John Curran, the president and CEO of ARIN held a presentation about IPv4 transfers. One of the slides stated that ARIN expects to run out of IPv4 addresses in early 2012. John also verbally hinted that it might actually be earlier than that. The presentation can be found here.

This prediction is very far away from my own prediction that ARIN will continue to have IPv4 addresses into April of 2014. I believe that John’s prediction is overly aggressive in terms of the depletion date. I’m looking at the statistics and facts that I have and I can really not see how ARIN will be depleted by the end of this years. Let’s look into this in more details. What I believe speaks for a later depletion date is that:

• ARIN has recently implemented a change in the policy so that you now only can request a supply of IPv4 to cover for the next 3 months of demand as oppose to 12 months of demand.
• ARIN currently holds the largest pool of free IPv4 addresses. The pool is about 6  x /8 or close to 100 million addresses.
• The current burn rate for ARIN is 0.1 x /8 pr about 1.6 million addresses per month. A simple linear extrapolation suggests depletion date 50+ months from now. That’s way into 2015!
• The consumption in the ARIN region has been very steady and linear lately. I don’t see any indication of that changing.

It is still however, good ideas to start implement IPv6 if you are in the ARIN region. What first and foremost should motivate you to do so is that APNIC and RIPE will soon be out of IPv4 addresses. There will soon be clients and servers in that region that you are unable to communicate with.

This week APNIC delegated their last IPv4 address the conventional way. The remaining pool of IPv4 addresses in the APNIC region will be delegated in small chunks of 1024 addresses. There is in other words nothing left other than breadcrumbs in this region.

In contradiction to my very exact estimate of the IANA depletion date, my tool and the mathematics I have been using failed to predict the APNIC depletion date with good accuracy. The algorithms that I have been using were not very good at predicting how an over 300% increase in demand over the last 2 months affected the depletion date. I would have been better off just using a linear algorithm with the last 2 months of demand as my input.

I must say that I was very surprised how quickly the APNIC pool got depleted. It appears that a “rush to the bank” happened once the members in the region realized that they might not get any additional IPv4 addresses. As the graph below indicates, the APNIC average burn rate went from slightly below 400,000 IPv4 addresses per day prior to the IANA exhaustion to almost 1.2 million IPv4 addresses per day after the IANA pool was depleted.

RIPE next

The current burn rates and the sizes of the RIR pools suggest that RIPE will be the next registrar to run out of free IPv4 addresses. RIPE have had a quite modest burn rate of about 150,000 addresses per day over the last year. The peak in the graph below in November is from when both Orange and T-mobile in the UK allocated 2 million addresses each (T-mobile and Orange actually merged their UK operations, so it is somewhat strange that they both could get 2 million addresses at the same day, but that is another story).

A linear extrapolation based on the RIPE burn rate and pool size suggests that RIPE would run out of IPv4 addresses in May of next year. There is currently no indication of a “rush to the bank” in the RIPE region. The current burn rate is actually slower than the yearly average.  

Modeling RIPE based on APNIC

We know that the demand in APNIC increased substantially when it was apparent that they would be the first RIR to be depleted. If RIPE is experiencing the same type of rush, when would then RIPE get depleted? Let’s do the math:

RIPE has 4.27 x /8 addresses left in their pool. This equals about 71,650,000 addresses.

The one year average burn rate in the RIPE region has been around 150,000 addresses per day. The rush experienced in APNIC increased the demand by 3.08 times. A similar increase in demand would get RIPE to a burn rate of 460,000 addresses per day. With such burn rate, RIPE would only be able to honor delegation requests for another 156 days.

Based on the calculations above, the RIPE depletion date could be as early as 19^th September 2011.

The wildcard in this calculation is of course if “RIR shopping” will become popular. The fear is that members of other regions will start allocating addresses in regions with remaining IPv4 addresses. If this will become a reality, we could see an even earlier RIPE depletion date.

APNIC has announced that they are running out of IPv4 addresses. They have less than 1 x /8 left. This trigger a very strict delegation policy and IPv4 addresses will not be available the conventional way any longer in the region.

This means that we soon will see IPv6 only hosts in Asia Pacific. If you are doing business online and intend to provide service to those clients you will have to have IPv6 implemented. This is the final warning that you will have to implement IPv6 regardless of what region you are located in.

A few recent allocations in the APNIC region to Pakistan and South Korea has pushed the global burn rate of IPv4 addresses over 3 x /8 per month. With only about 16 blocks of free IPv4 left in all pools combined, it is not hard realize that IPv6 is needed sooner rather than later.

Last time the burn rate was this high was in May 1995 when Ford, US defense agency DISA and Prudential all got one /8 allocated. At that point, IPv4 addresses was of course handed out in a very wasteful way.

Most of the IPv4 allocations are being made in the APNIC region. I must confess that the tool doesn’t do a good job of modeling the allocation spike that we are seeing in APNIC currently. A more realistic prediction is probably that APNIC will be depleted in May 2011. Some readers have suggested April. I do not believe in April, because it will be hard for members that recently got large address space allocated to justify yet another allocation prior to the depletion (A rush to concert tickets will be most severe the first couple of hours/days, then the rate will slow down even if tickets still are available)

Another interesting thing is that we clearly can see that the ARIN policy that caps the maximum allocation to a 3 month demand has kicked in. In fact, the ARIN burn rate is quite high, but there are no allocations larger than 250,000 IPv4 addresses the last 30 days.

As many readers have noticed, today Microsoft bought 600k addresses from whatever is left of the bankrupt Nortel. One article about this can be found here

The interesting thing is that ARIN still have addresses available so they could potentially have requested them from ARIN instead. What is the motivation for Microsoft to buy these old legacy addresses? I can think of some reasons:

1. If these are legacy addresses, then they don’t have to pay any annual fee to ARIN for them. What would be the ROI for this?
2. They don’ t necessary have to use them in the ARIN region. They could use them in the APNIC region instead for example.
3. They don’t know what they are doing.
4. They didn’t really do it. It is just a rumor.

Please comment here if you have any additional insight or ideas on why Microsoft did this.

I’m quoted in this network world article about Verizon and how many IPv4 addresses they might have left.

Network World

Ripe is currently test announcing the following blocks: 185.0.0.0/10, 176.0.0.0/8, 37.0.0.0/10, 5.0.0.0/10. Those blocks show up as delegated in the statistics from RIPE, but they are not really used because they will be delegated the conventional way once the test completes. They falsely moved the RIPE depletion date earlier with 4 months.

These blocks have now been removed in the depletion calculations.

APNIC announced that the 153.128.0.0/9 block of 8 million Ipv4 addresses will be delegated to NTT communications in Japan. This delegation used up around 10% of the remaining IPv4 addresses in the APNIC region.

The latest calculations are now estimating that APNIC will run out of IPv4 addresses in August.