© 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.

The world IPv6 day is finally here. Several large organizations are participating. Google is now responding with an IPv6 address for www.google.com when you ask their DNS forcing clients to try IPv6 prior to IPv4.

Some statistics about IPv6 traffic can be found here: For the Internet Exchange in Amsterdam and for Akamai
It is hard to tell right now if there is a significant increase in IPv6 traffic around the globe.

If you know any other sites that provides real time statistics, let me know.