The IPv4 Depletion site

The 5 final IPv4 blocks have now been distributed to the RIRs according to the global policy

102/8 AfriNIC
103/8 APNIC
104/8 ARIN
179/8 LACNIC
185/8 RIPE

There are in other words no UNALLOCATED space left in the IANA pool

Today IANA, announced that APNIC allocated 2 x /8. There are only 5 x /8 left in the IANA pool, however these 5 blocks will soon distributed evenly to each of the Regional Registrars. This is it; there are no additional IPv4 addresses in the global IPv4 pool! Now is the time to start implementing IPv6 if you haven’t done so already. We probably have about 6 months before IPv6 only clients will start showing up in Asia/Pacific.

I will continue to fill this site with useful information and news about the individual pools of IPv4 and how to implement IPv6. Please check back soon for updated counters and content.

As everybody can see, my depletion countdown has been showing “today” for quite some time now. The reason is that APNIC’s pool is at a level where they normally would request and get 2 x /8 allocated from IANA. At this point in time, the IANA depletion date is defined by the discrete event when IANA decides to delegate these last 2 blocks to APNIC. However, APNIC and/or IANA are for some reason is waiting longer than expected to finalize this last delegation.

There has been a lot of discussion on the Internet and on this site about when the IANA depletion date will actually be. We know that it will be in the next couple of weeks but the exact details are unknown. Some theories are emerging:

Geoff Huston’s ipv4depletion site suddenly stopped moving and jumped from Jan-20 to Feb-2 a few days ago. His site has steadily predicted this date for a few days now, even when large delegations were made that normally would shift this date. Does he know something we don’t know?

A gentleman in UK claims to know the date but claims to be under NDA so that he can’t reveal it. Could it be the case that IANA is planning some kind of global event around the event and is recruiting experts from around the globe to participate in such global event?

This dude, told the whole world on twitter that he had inside information and that he knew that the IANA pool would be depleted this week. Well, that was last week so he was obviously wrong, but could this be an indication of the fact that APNIC actually already sent their request to IANA? Maybe IANA is holding this up?

This site is claiming that the IANA depletion would occur this week:
And that the last 5 blocks likely will be handed over to the RIRs during the ICANN meeting in San Francisco in March. Interesting theory with the meeting in San Francisco, I like it.

Please comment here if you have any other theory or know something that I don’t know. I will promise to protect any source in true wikileak spirit! You can always reach me at Stephan at Lagerholm dot com

The fine folks at Gogo6 just released videos from their IPv6 conference in November of last year. Here are a few with me in them:

Me and Tony Hain discussing IPv4 depletion models (did I say April there?)

Me discussing Secure64 products

Panel discussion with Me, Elise Gerich ICANN, John Curran ARIN, Tony Hain Cisco, David Ward Juniper

You can find the rest of the videos from the event here

Some recent IPv4 delegations from APNIC have moved the anticipated IANA allocation date closer. APNIC’s pool is down to 2.39 x /8. This indicates that we are now 1-2 weeks away from the big IANA depletion event. The following large networks got allocated in recent days: 36.192.0.0/11 and 101.144.0.0/12 to China TieTong Telecommunications and 101.244.0.0/14 to Beijing Time-vision Telecommunication

Written by Stephan Lagerholm (C) 2011.

The year 2010 was perhaps the last year we will see without significant progress around IPv6. Here are some of (IMHO) the top 10 IPv6 related stories in 2010. Did I miss any significant story? Please comment.

1. Google turns on IPv6 for Youtube
Google turns on Ipv6 for YouTube at 28 January of 2010. Service providers around the globe are seeing a significant increase in Ipv6 traffic.

2. Comcast start IPv6 trials
Comcast announces end user Ipv6 trials in January of 2010. Over 5,000 customers sign up for the trials.
http://www.comcast6.net/

3. DNS64/NAT64 becomes an alternative to Dual Stack
T-mobile US and a few wireless providers in Slovenia explains to the world that they are seriously considering Ipv6 only handsets using 6 to 4 gateways to reach the IPv4 Internet. The technique used is DNS64/NAT64 and T-mobile announces an open trial in September that people with the Ipv6 capable handsets can sign up for.
http://groups.google.com/group/tmoipv6beta

4. The realization of IPv6 brokenness
In May of 2010 news are released around the fact that adding AAAA to your DNS might break some clients. The problem appears to be because of an old versions of the Opera Broswer and old versions of MacOS doesn’t handle dual stack correctly. This becomes a major discussion topic after Tore Anderson reports his findings and gets slashdotted.
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/05/04/2029255/Mac-OS-X-Problem-Puts-Up-a-Block-To-IPv6

5. Increased interest in the “when” question
People are realizing that it is not a matter of IF if they need to deploy IPv6, it is a matter of WHEN. So what’s the target date? People, Experts and bloggers around the web are speculating and have different theories. However, the question when IANA depletion date will be exhausted suddenly becomes much clearer when AfriNIC unexpectedly allocates 1 x /8 in November. After that, more or less everybody agrees on an end of January / Beginning of February 2011 timeframe.

6. The new IPv6 OMB mandate for the federal US
In September, the Office of Management and Budget is releasing a new IPv6 mandate. This mandate is somewhat more direct in terms of what needs to be done compared to the old IPv6 mandate that in reality never got implemented. The new timeframe is September 2012 for external services and September 2014 for internal networks. Not that very aggressive but better than nothing.
http://www.cio.gov/documents/IPv6MemoFINAL.pdf

7. Lack of IPv6 strategies from some large organizations
2010 is the year when it becomes clear that some service and content providers are falling seriously behind in IPv6 preparation and rollout. It becomes clear that they will have a hard time catching up, risking revenue and customers.
I will not mention any of the laggards here, instead I want to thank organizations that are adopting and promoting IPv6: Comcast, Verizon Wireless, T-mobile, Softlayer, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Netflix, ARIN, Cisco, Juniper and Gogo6 are some of them.

8. Increased IPv4 allocation rate
The allocation rate from IANA to the RIRs exploded in 2011 resulting in a record 19 x /8 blocks allocated to the RIRs. Statistically you can see that the RIRs are also experiencing an increased demand for IPv4 addresses from their members, culminating in October when Comcast gets a /9 allocated.
http://www.ipv4depletion.com/?p=493

9. Return of the Interop Ipv4 network
Most of the legacy Interop show network with 16 million IPv4 addresses are returned to ARIN in November. But don’t draw any foolish conclusions; this is most likely the last of the legacy /8 to be recovered.
https://www.arin.net/announcements/2010/20101020.html

10. The IPv6 Task force summits
People interested in IPv6 are organizing themselves in different IPv6 Task Forces around the globe. The local task forces in the US are organizing several well attended events:
www.txv6tf.org , www.rmv6tf.org , www.cav6tf.org

Written by Stephan Lagerholm © 2011

All RIRs have implemented or are discussing some changes to their IPv4 allocation policy that will kick in when they receive their last allocation from IANA (should be any day now).
The changes can be divided into two categories. The first category restricts how many IPv4 addresses each individual account holder can get. The second category sets a number of IPv4 addresses aside for a future unforeseen use. Below is an overview over all the policies. Make sure to take those policies into account when you estimate how many IPv4 addresses will be able to get before all IPv4 pools are depleted.

APNIC

ID: prop-062-v002
Status: Implemented

Restriction: Each APNIC account holder will that meets the criteria for an IPv4 allocation will be eligible to request and receive a single allocation no larger than the minimum allocation size.
Set aside: A /16 will be held in reserve for future uses, as yet unforeseen.

LACNIC

ID: LAC-2008-04
Status: Implemented.

Restriction: LACNIC must reserve a last /12 under a special criteria. However LACNIC notes on the website that they forecast that the reserved space may be incremented to /10 by new allocation policies approved by LACNIC PDP.

set aside: No set aside policy exists or are under discussion.

ARIN

ID: 2008-5, 2009-8 (Prop-123 and Prop-124)
Status: Discussion Implemented

Restriction: ARIN NRPM section 4.2.4.4. “Subscriber Members After One Year” was implemented in early 2010 as a result of draft policy 2009-8: Equitable IPv4 Run-Out. It limits the request of IPv4 addresses to a three month supply after IANA IPv4 pool depletion.

ARIN-prop-124 is a proposal to clarify that the 3 month restriction only applies to new requests, not requests that are already in queue at the time of IANA IPv4 pool depletion. Unfortunately in my opinion, that proposal was abandoned by the AC at their December meeting and is not currently under discussion.

Set aside:

ARIN NRPM section 4.10 “Dedicated IPv4 block to facilitate IPv6 Deployment” was implemented in 2008 as a result of draft policy 2008-5: Dedicated IPv4 block to facilitate IPv6 Deployment. It reserves a /10 of IPv4 space for transitional technologies specifically.

The new proposal puts an additional /20 aside. “Upon receipt of the last /8 that the IANA will allocate to ARIN per the Global Policy for the Allocation of the Remaining IPv4 Address Space, ARIN will place a contiguous /20 in reserve for Critical Infrastructure.”

Interesting to note here is that both these still are proposals. The next ARIN meeting will be in April. The global IANA pool will already be depleted at that time. Thanks Chris Grundemann for correcting me on the ARIN policy.

AfriNIC

ID: AFPUB-2010-v4-005
Status: Discussion

Restriction: During this phase, allocation/assignment of address space will continue as in the Current phase (/24 for a EU and /22 for a LIR) but the maximum will change from /10 to /13.
Allocations and assignments will be made from the /8 pool until we reach a /11. At this point the Transition to IPv6 phase will kick in.
During this phase a minimum allocation/assignment size will be /27. the maximum allocation/assignment will be /22.
If any LIR or End User requesting IPv4 address space during the Exhaustion Phase does not already have IPv6 address space, then AfriNIC shall allocate or assign an IPv6 address block in compliance with the IPv6 allocation or assignment policies in effect at the time.
The current allocation and assignment period of 12 months shall be changed to 8 months. This will help to ensure that LIRs request only for resources they need in the short to medium term, and promote fairness in the equitable distribution of the last IPv4 address pool.
Set aside: A /12 IPv4 address block will be in reserve out of the Last /8.

RIPE

Status: Concluding (will likely soon be implemented)
ID: 2010-02

Restriction: On application for IPv4 resources LIRs will receive IPv4 addresses according to the following:
a. LIRs may only receive one allocation from this /8. The size of the allocation made under this policy will be exactly one /22.
b. LIRs receive only one /22, even if their needs justify a larger allocation.
c. LIRs may apply for and receive this allocation once they meet the criteria to receive IPv4 address space according to the allocation policy in effect in the RIPE NCC service region at the time of application.
d. Allocations will only be made to LIRs if they have already received an IPv6 allocation from an upstream LIR or the RIPE NCC.
Set aside: A /16 will be held in reserve for some future uses

Rumors says that APNIC will start issue a daily public report of the available IPv4 address at APNIC starting in Jan 2011. But due to the irregular nature of the incoming requests, they say that they can not predict when APNIC’s supply of IPv4 will run out.

For people reading the www.ipv4depletion.com site this has been available for a long time. The number of free addresses at each RIR can be found in the dashboard (hold the mouse over the gauge to see the exact number in /8)

The IPv4depletion.com site is also brave enough to make a prediction when APNIC and other RIRs will run out.

© Stephan Lagerholm, 2010.

Now with the IANA pool getting depleted in a few moths it is interesting to take a look at what will happen afterwards. One source of IPv4 addresses that will come into use is the so called Various Pool. The history of the various pool is that prior to IPv4 classless Inter Domain Routing the class-B and class-C networks was allocated directly to end organizations from a set of IPv4 /8 blocks. These blocks are still around and got quite a bit of free IPv4 space in them (about 7.5 x /8). When looking at the IANA statistics file they show up as LEGACY blocks.

There is an agreement from 2008 between the NRO and IANA on how these blocks will be distributed amongst the RIRs. The idea is that they should be distributed to the RIRs according to this letter. The intention of the agreement appears to have been to distribute the blocks evenly. The XLS spreadsheet that is attached to the letter shows that they did a pretty good job making sure that all RIRs got the same number of addresses. 7.5 x /8 sounds good, right? However, there are issues with these blocks and things have happened since 2008. With the IPv4 depletion date around the corner, it is time to take a new look at the status of the various pool.

The 188/8 block
The 188/8 block was supposed to go to RIPE post IANA depletion. However, RIPE has already used up most of this block as I noted in March 2009

188/8 was completely empty except for one /16 allocating prior to RIPE starting to use it lately. Because RIPE already used up most of 188/8 they will get significantly lesser IPv4 addresses than the other RIRs when the various pool is divided between the RIRs.

The 191/8 block
The 191/8 block will go to LACNIC. An interesting thing with this block is that it is totally unused. The 191.255/16 network used to be reserved by RFC3330 but was freed up when RFC5735 was published in the beginning of 2010. So LACNIC gained 65k extra addresses, no big deal. But should this block still be in the various pool since it is empty?

The 196/8 block
It appears that the NRO and IANA forgot to include the 196/8 in their calculations. This block contains the equivalent to 0.71 x /8 or around 12 million IPv4 addresses in nice and large contiguous blocks. It has historically been used by several different RIRs but lately it delegations from this block has predominantly been made by AfriNIC who also handles the reverse DNS and whois for the block.

Personally, I’m all for giving less developed regions more IPv4 addresses. However, at some point it becomes very wasteful. AfriNIC already have (or will get) IPv4 addresses to cover their demand until the year of 2015 even with an exponential growth of the demand in the region. Five years from now I hope that IPv6 will be the predominant network protocol on the Internet and the value of an IPv4 address will be pretty low. Giving AfriNIC more IPv4 will not really help because no organization that hasn’t deployed IPv6 by 2015 will not be able to communicate with the IPv6 Only Internet that will be pretty big by then. It is unclear how NRO/IANA will clear up this mess. However, let’s assume for now that this block will be given to AfriNIC.

Gravel
The various pool are remains from /8 blocks used for class-B or class-C delegations prior to CIDR. They are therefore chopped up in smaller chunks and the free space is non-contiguous. Large service providers would rather get larger chunks of IPv4 addresses that small gravel to simplify maintenance and keep down the size of the routing table. Here is a list of the blocks that are in decent shape.
APNIC: 171/8 usable, 153/8 upper half free, 139/8 Some large free blocks
ARIN: 162/2 upper half mostly free, 172/8 mostly usable
LACNIC: 152/8 some usable blocks, 191/8 totally free
AfriNIC: 154/8 mostly free, 156/8 large chunks free on the upper half.
RIPE: 151/8 some large blocks free, with the biggest being 2 million addresses.

Conclusion
Unless something changes, the number of IPv4 addresses each RIR gets from the various pool will be:
RIPE: 0.67 x /8
LAC : 1.55 x /8
ARIN: 1.54 x /8
APNI: 1.54 x /8
AFRI: 2.25 x /8

The issues with 188/8, 191/8 and 196/8 as discussed above are the reason why the distribution is somewhat skewed. But how much “gravel” is there in those block? An interesting exercise is to remove all of the small blocks (smaller than 100k addresses). If we do that, the picture looks somewhat different:
RIPE: 0.33 x /8
LAC : 1.27 x /8
ARIN: 1.06 x /8
APNI: 1.27 x /8
AFRI: 2.01 x /8

As you can see, RIPE and ARIN appears to have gotten the most of the fragmented blocks from the various pool. If you are a large service provider you need to be aware of the fact that you might not be able to get large contiguous blocks of IPv4 addresses as we move closer to RIR depletion.

/written by Stephan Lagerholm (C) 2010

Today IANA announced that RIPE allocated 5/8 and 37/8 and that ARIN allocated 23/8 and100/8

This leaves only 2 x /8 in the IANA pool that APNIC most likely will pick up in the beginning of next year.

That’s it, no more IPv4 addresses, party is over, go home. We had 40 six-packs of beer when the party started, now there are only 2 bottles left…

/S