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

Ladies and Gentlemen, history in the making…

Today AfriNIC got the 105/8 block allocated from IANA. This is surprisingly early, I was expecting AfriNIC to request more space in April of next year. This is moving the IANA depletion date much earlier (February of next year instead of April).

ARIN will soon get two blocks from IANA too. I asked John Curran about it at the recent Gogo6live Ipv6 conference and he vaguely admitted that ARIN will request space soon. It wouldn’t surprise me if that would be this week.

This leaves us with 4 x /8 left. Most likely, two for APNIC and two for RIPE. APNIC has around 4 x /8 in its pool which should be sufficient for them until early February of next week. By that time they will only have around 2 x /8 left and they will refill with another 2 x /8. RIPE currently have 2.88 x /8 in their pool. RIPE is currently allocating in a quite slow pace and the 0.88 x /8 will most likely last until late February of next year. They will then have 2 x /8 in the pool and will be able to justify another allocation of 2 x /8. After that there will be no more IPv4 addresses in the central pool.

It is really time to start implementing IPv6…

The fact that AfriNIC has handed out a farly large number of IPv4 addresses lately has raised some interesting concerns about when the IANA pool will run out. Is AfriNIC’s high allocation rate just a coincidence, or is this a trend that will continue?

This raises an interesting concern. Will AfriNIC actually be able to allocate an additional block from IANA before the central pool of IPv4 addresses gets depleted? They would get that last block at APNIC’s expense. This would also cause the IANA depletion date to be bumped earlier with about a month.

A lot suggest that this will be the case. The table below shows all allocations larger than 50,000 IPv4 that has been allocated this year from AfriNIC’s pool. AfriNIC has about 87% of a /8 block left in their pool today. According to the allocation policy between RIRs and IANA they are allowed to request more space when their current space goes below 50% of one /8. So they will do so if they manage to burn 37% of a /8 before the IANA pool is depleted. Their current burn rate is about 800,000 addresses per month (5% of a /8 per month). Burning 37% of a /8 would in this case take about 7-8 months for them.

Size    Region  Country         Date            IPv4 number
2097152 afrinic TN              20100503        197.0.0.0
524288  afrinic EG              20100308        197.192.0.0
524288  afrinic DZ              20100528        197.200.0.0
262144  afrinic MU              20100407        197.224.0.0
131072  afrinic KE              20100616        41.80.0.0
65536   afrinic KE              20100108        41.89.0.0
65536   afrinic EG              20100108        41.88.0.0
65536   afrinic SN              20100528        41.62.0.0
65536   afrinic ZA              20100527        41.61.0.0
65536   afrinic ZM              20100513        41.60.0.0
65536   afrinic TZ              20100413        41.59.0.0
65536   afrinic NG              20100308        41.58.0.0
65536   afrinic ZA              20100129        41.57.0.0
65536   afrinic ZA              20100125        41.56.0.0

Algeria Telecom allocates about 1 million addresses from AfriNIC. This is the second allocation that AfriNIC has made lately that is larger than a million addresses. AfriNICs burnrate for the last 30 days is unusually high and almost as high as the burn rate in the RIPE NCC region (Europe, Middle East and Central Asia).

Comparing the Burn Rate for AfriNIC and RIPE NCC. The gauges are updated continuously


More information about the burn rate can be found in under the tab
new dashboard.

Recently, the service provider MTN in South Africa allocated 1 million addresses from AfriNIC. This is the second biggest allocation Afrinic has ever made. MTN seems to be a mobile phone operator offering mobile broadband services as well as traditional cell phone services. According to their website, they are also official sponsors for the Soccer world cup 2010. Perhaps are they getting their network ready for the massive invasion of soccer fans next year? The network they just got assigned is 41.112.0.0/12.

Note that the allocation has no effect on the IANA and first RIR depletion dates as AfriNIC have plenty of addresses and are not expected to make any additional allocations from IANA.