North America Runs Out of IPv4 Addresses

DW100 writes: The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) has been forced to reject a request for more IPv4 addresses for the first time as its stock of remaining address reaches exhaustion. The lack of IPv4 addresses has led to renewed calls for the take-up of IPv6 addresses in order to start embracing the next era of the internet.

Comments

It's the end of the world as we know it!

[Chas]

The sky is falling!

The sky is falling!

It hit me on the head! *OW! NOT THAT ONE!*

"Runs out".

Yeah. Okay. And how many companies are sitting on vast blocks that are only partially tapped?

This isn't so much an issue of lack (though at some point it'll become that).
It's an issue created by how assignment of address blocks was and is managed.

Re:It's the end of the world as we know it!

[Daimanta]

Trying to get companies with big internet presence to return their allocated blocks to the (ARIN)-pool would take for too much time and effort and is without any form of guarantee. Furthermore, even if they would manage to return the blocks to the pool in a couple of years, it would both be too late and too little and the demand for address space far outpaces the supply that ipv4 can offer. Realistically, ipv6 is the only long-term solution for any part of the world even including Africa as the increase of internet availability on the continent will rapidly consume their own pool. Hopefully, the African states are smart enough to push for an ipv6-enabled infrastructure.

Re:It's the end of the world as we know it!

[halltk1983]

Why would they return something that they could sell?

Re:It's the end of the world as we know it!

[Ultra64]

>And how many companies are sitting on vast blocks that are only partially tapped?

Good idea, let's make those companies give up their /8s.

That should give us a few more weeks worth of IP addresses.

Re:It's the end of the world as we know it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Only a tiny fraction of people online today, were around to see the internet when it worked. Remember when every machine had a real routable IP address. NAT sucks for everything but making windows machines slightly harder to find before infesting them with malware.

Re:The addresses are there... but still...

[xaxa]

It's correct to use assigned addresses for internal hosts. The point is they're unique — you can set up a tunnel between any two organisations, or merge two networks, and not have to renumber things because both were using 10/8.

The cost to renumber and use their assignment more efficiently would be huge, similar to the cost to move to IPv6 but with little gain.

Re:Fricking finally.

[Anonymous Coward]

Start?

Re:Wasn't this originally predicted

[Anonymous Coward]

It wasn't crying wolf, at that time the growth was amazing and the policies for handing out IPs were much looser. They also didn't factor in for the facts that the policies would be changed and people would NAT NAT as Xzibit hadn't yet taught us about doing things while we're doing things. If NAT hadn't become so common we would have run out of IP addresses a very long time ago.

If they hadn't "cried wolf" then, I can only imagine how long ago we would have hit this point as we wouldn't have made adjustments to practices to push it into the future.

It's amazing how many morons will see that the rate at which a massive problem is coming is slower than anticipated and conclude that it's not a real problem. It's usually better to err on the side of caution and expedience as you rarely do things to quickly with regards to large problems.

Re:Hakuna matata

[Dagger2]

The real picture is that IP addresses are allocated hierarchically and there are multiple entities at all levels except the root, all of which run out separately.

IANA (the root of the tree, the people who allocate addresses to the regional registries) ran out of /8s in Feb 2011. The regional registries (there are five of them; these are the people that allocate addresses to ISP) have their allocated pools of /8s which ran out at different times: APNIC ran out in Apr 2011 (that's the story you linked), RIPE in 2012, LACNIC in 2014 and ARIN just now. (AFRINIC still has a few years to go, although they won't if everybody tries to get their addresses from there.)

Then there are the ISPs, who allocate addresses to their customers. ISPs will tell you that "we have plenty of addresses left" -- except the ones who don't -- but at some point all ISPs (or perhaps more importantly, your ISP) are going to move into the "don't" category.

And finally, ISP customers (i.e. you) allocate addresses to networks. Except you've probably never experienced this, because we've been short on v4 addresses for long enough that many ISPs don't (can't) give you enough IPs for your networks, and haven't for years and years. You probably grew up with this and consider it normal; it's not.

I don't know when you're going to go from "we seem to be trucking on just fine" to realizing that we have a problem -- I'd say we already do, since lots of people waste lots of time and money due to NAT, but perhaps for you it'll take your ISP giving you an RFC 1918 address on your upstream before you realize. Or maybe you have infinite time and money and don't mind the headaches caused by many layers of NAT and all the workarounds needed to deal with them, and you don't mind paying programmers to write workarounds into software, and you don't care about all the things we could've had if the internet had been up to providing them. But hopefully I've shed some light on the highly-complicated reality of "guy A allocates to guy B who allocates to guy C".

Re: It won't work that way

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think "routable" and "insecure" are synonyms, you're going to have a hell of a time with IPv6