At Current Rates, Only a Few More Years' Worth of IPv4 Addresses

An anonymous reader excerpts from an interesting article at Ars Technica, which begins "There are 3,706,650,624 usable IPv4 addresses. On January 1, 2000, approximately 1,615 million (44 percent) were in use and 2,092 million were still available. Today, ten years later, 2,985 million addresses (81 percent) are in use, and 722 million are still free. In that time, the number of addresses used per year increased from 79 million in 2000 to 203 million in 2009. So it's a near certainty that before Barack Obama vacates the White House, we'll be out of IPv4 address[es]. (Even if he doesn't get re-elected.)"

Comments

Don't say "NAT"

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we start the discussion by not immediately going to the "NAT will save us" argument? Just accept that while NAT deployments might put it off, IPv6 deployment is inevitably necessary.

Re:How many more times are we going to run out?

[Burdell]

RTFS and do the math. 203 million addresses were allocated in 2009; a /8 is 16.7 million addresses; reclaiming a /8 (which would probably take a lot of time and effort, possibly in court) would put off the IPv4 depletion by about one month. It isn't worth the effort; better to put it into IPv6.

Re:No, that's propaganda

[Zocalo]

I know you are joking, but there is a very good reason why Asia is so keen on IPv6 adoption; they are going to feel the crunch first and they know it. IANA has in place an agreement that as soon as one of the RIRs is assigned one of the five final /8s each of the other four RIRs receives one of the remaining /8s and IANA washes their hands of the whole mess. That's without a doubt the most critical milestone along the path to IPv4 exhaustion, so let's look at that instant from the point of each of the RIRs:

• AfriNIC: Incredibly slow burn rate. They're probably still good for another decade or two at this point.
• APNIC: Includes China and India, two of the fastest developing nations on the planet with correspondingly high IPv4 assignment requests. There's no two ways about it; without wholesale IPv6 adoption, they're going to be the ones running out first.
• ARIN: Capitalists to the end, they are on record as saying IPv4 exhaustion is not their problem to solve; it's first come first served and when they are all gone that's it. Even so, there are plenty of US institutions with /8s that could mostly be handed back and reassigned if push came to shove.
• LACNIC: Not quite as low AfriNIC due to developing countries like Brazil, but are still able to sit back and let any problems with IPv6 get resolved before they make the leap.
• RIPE: Have already got the strictest IP assignment policies of the RIRs and will probably just continue to tighten the screw right up until the point of exhaustion; LIR assignment windows are typically about one quarter of what they would have been five years ago. It's a pretty fair bet that APNIC and ARIN will both beat them to the wall.

Pre-emptive strike

[fbjon]

"IPv6 addresses are too long and complicated to type"

...is like saying solar panels are too hard to build when you run out of slave labor in hamster wheels.

"We don't need IPv6 since there is NAT"

...is like saying we don't need new energy solutions because beeswax candles are a tried and trusted technology.

"The Internet will be overrun by zombies when NATs no longer protect us."

...is like saying avoiding antibacterial soap will cause untold misery and disease.

"Just re-allocate some of the wasted space in Class A nets."

...is like saying overcrowding of the planet can be mitigated by decreasing the size of houses.