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.

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.

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.

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.

APNIC continues to delegate large IPv4 networks to organizations in Asia. This makes the global allocation rate skyrocket. Globally, the RIRs delegated almost half a /8 this week so far (Wednesday), this is an extraordinary pace considering the usual pace of slightly over one /8 per month.

Here are some of the most significant delegations made this week so far:
223.32.0.0/11 or about 2 million addresses to SK Telecom in South Korea
14.160.0.0/11 and 14.224.0.0/11 or about a total of 4 million addresses to VietNam Post and Telecom Corporation in Vietnam
14.104.0.0/13 or about 500k addresses to China Telecom Chongqing Province Network
14.8.0.0/13 or about 500k addresses to KDDI corporation in Japan

As a few readers noticed, APNIC allocated the networks 49/8 and 101/8 from IANA today. This is block number #5 and #6 that has been allocated by APNIC this year. They previously allocated 2 blocks in January and April.

APNIC will probably allocate new blocks again in October. After that, ARIN will probably make the last allocation for the year in November.

APNIC continues to delegate large IPv4 networks to China and the rest of the region.

The network 223.240.0.0/13 or about half a million addresses was delegated to China Telecom Anhui Province. China Telecom is the largest ISP in the world serving about 55 million customers.

The networks 14.32.0.0/11 and 14.64.0.0/11 totalling around 4 million IPv4 addresses was delegated to Korea Telecom.
A quarter million addresses in the network 223.208.0.0/14 as delegated to Greatwall Broadband Network in China.

APNIC has historically allocated new addresses from IANA when their pool size has been about 2 x /8. Their pool recently got below that number so we can assume that we will see an allocation of 2 x /8 from IANA to APNIC soon.

All the RIR’s pool will be pretty well filled after this allocation. The sum of all the RIR’s and the various pool will be about 21.5 x /8. This is a historically high number. I don’t expect to see any allocations for a while until ARIN and APNIC would have to refill their pool in the November/December time frame.

After that I would expect RIPE and APNIC to allocate in February of 2011 and then finally AfriNIC snatching the last block from the IANA pool somewhere March/April of next year.

Here is an explanation if you are curios why the predicted depletion date was moved to an earlier date all of the sudden. APNIC made some very large allocations yesterday.

• China Mobile allocated a quarter of the 223/8 netblock. This equals about 4 million addresses and the addresses were in the range 223.64.0.0 – 223.127.255.255.
• China Telecom allocated about 750 thousand addresses to the Shanxi province in the ranges 1.68.0.0 – 1.71.255.255 and 223.8.0.0 – 223.15.255.255. Additionally they allocated about half a million addresses to the MeiMengGu province in the range 1.180.0.0 – 1.183.255.255 a few days ago.
• NTTDoCoMo in Japan allocated the range 1.72.0.0 – 1.79.255.255 or about ½ million addresses.

LACNIC recently allocated 1 Million addresses to NIC Mexico for further allocations to organisations in the region. This allocation pushes LACNIC’s pool a low level. We might see LACNIC requesting 2 more blocks from IANA soon. That allocation would most likely be the last allocation of IPv4 addresses LACNIC ever will make.

RIPE NCC and APNIC are also getting close to needing more addresses so we might see a total of 3 allocations of 2 blocks each soon. After the summer, I expect that we only will have 9 usable block in the IANA pool (except for the additional 5 that is already reserved for each RIR).

The estimated depletion date has been steady for the last couple of months. It is steadily pointing to a depletion of the IANA pool in March next year.