IPAM

As I pondered my prior post regarding ARIN's announcement of its IPv4 address capacity dwindling down to a single /8, I began to wonder how long it would be before those supporting only IPv4 communications would feel the impact. The "impact" of ignoring IPv6 may be the inability to communicate with THE growth segment of the Internet. Once IPv4 is totally depleted, ALL growth will by necessity utilize IPv6. And this total depletion time may come very soon. As I pointed out in that post, the sum total IPv4 address space that's available globally is about 0.1 billion. Truthfully, ISPs that obtain space from RIRs and enterprises from ISPs, likewise have their own stock of IPv4 capacity, but once the RIRs run out, there will be no additional space to be had. Consider that the 0.1 billion IP addresses represents a mere 1.4% of the world's population of 7.2 billion. One simple minded conclusion would be that the IPv4 Internet can support a mere 1.4% increase in Interne...

ARIN today announced that it is now down to its last /8 of IPv4 address space. This is the point when remaining IPv4 capacity is considered "depleted" and more stringent allocation policies are put into effect, as outlined in the announcement. The analogous depletion state was announced and similar policies enforced by APNIC in 2011 and by RIPE in 2012. LACNIC crossed the /8 threshold in 2011 but will engage its depletion policies when it reaches one /11 (2.1M IP addresses). The last /8 threshold means the RIR has about 16.8 million IPv4 addresses available, which may seem like a lot, but each allocation consists of hundreds if not thousands of IP addresses to ISPs and customers. Hence the more stringent allocation policies to extend the lifetime of IPv4 a bit longer. You can follow the current outlook on IPv4 lifetime by RIR on Geoff Huston's potaroo site and summarized below and updated with this recent ARIN information: RIR Projected Exhaustion Date Remaining /8s ...