For the last 10 years I have read: "Yes, IPv4 addresses are running out.. blaa FUD blaa blaa FUD"
So far nothing has happened. Most computers out there are NAT'ed so, please stop spreading FUD.
And indeed, they have been running out for the past ten years - look at slide 5 from this presentation:
https://www.arin.net/knowledge/v4_deplete_v6_adopt.pdf
The fact is that ISPs and hosting companies are having to now undergo major changes in order to continue
to grow. The fact that we've known this was coming and developed IPv6, gotten into every major OS and the
gear of every major network equipment manufacturer is simply good preparation for what's to come.
In this stage, APNIC has a fixed block of address space reserved and available under a special policy for new and emerging service providers, but that doesn't help one much if you're a existing telecomm company who had been getting tens of thousands of addresses every few months in order to grow - you can now longer obtain additional blocks and now must scramble to come up with an alternative (such as IPv6) if you want to keep growing.
More info - http://www.apnic.net/community/ipv4-exhaustion/exhaustion-and-network-operators
There is a finite number of IPv4 address (2**32, aka approx 4.3 billion)... There are 7 billion people on the planet today, and most want an always on smartphone, and a home computer, and a computer at work, etc. This doesn't consider the demand for office servers, data centers, cloud services, etc.
The reality is that the depletion of the free pool doesn't mean we run out, but it does start us on the path of higher and higher utilization of these 4.3B numbers. At some point, it becomes very difficult to get additional addresses because all of the relatively easily recovered address space has been redeployed. For an ISP, this won't be 2012, but there's no assurance that its not going to happen very quickly in the next few years.
I don't know what your source of information is, but i recall a previous announcement that no more IPv4 address were being provided, and that only IPv6 were being given out.
If that is true, then we are already out of the IPv4 addresses. and the big IPv6 potential doomsday has already come and gone.
It's worth reading the original article referenced in the post... The central free pool of IPv4 address space ran out on 3 February 2011. The Asia Pacific region (under the APNIC registry) ran out of address space for issuance per their standard policies at the start of summer. RIPE (serving Europe) is likely to run out in this spring, and ARIN is likely to run out in early 2013. Telecommunication companies and ISPs rely on getting additional address space from their regional registry, and if they can't get any more IPv4 space, they either need to stop adding new customers, scavenge IPv4 space from elsewhere, or use IPv6 for new customers.
Only parties with operational need can obtain address space, whether that's directly from the Internet number registries or via transfer from an existing address holder.
Correct. If you received IPv4 address space directly from one of the Internet number registries (whether that was IANA, or the InterNIC, or a regional Internet registry), the address space is assigned to you and can be transferred to another party according to the policies of the registry serving your region. If you received address space from your ISP, it's quite likely that the ISP is only providing it to you as a component of service and will recover them if you leave or change providers.
( Here's an example of lessons learned - this message from Facebook Engineering http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150198443513920 )
World IPv6 Day came to an end earlier today. We successfully enabled IPv6 on our site for 24 hours, with great results. We saw over 1 million users reach us over IPv6.
We’re pleased that we did not see any increase in the number of users seeking help from our Help Center. The estimated 0.03% of users who may have been affected would have experienced slow page loads during the test.
Based on the encouraging results, we’ve decided to leave our Developer site dual-stacked, supporting both IPv4 and IPv6. And we will continue to adapt our entire code base and tools to support IPv6.
We are glad to have joined with the Internet Society, major Web companies, and other industry players to enable IPv6 for this test day. It was a great opportunity to test our infrastructure and IPv6 readiness.
IPv6 is vital to the continued growth of the Internet, and World IPv6 Day was a great step in the advancement of the protocol. We hope the overall success of the 24 hour test will encourage others in the industry to establish reliable IPv6 connectivity and develop robust IPv6 products.
7 Billion people on the planet... While many today do not have Internet connectivity, that's changing rapidly where some regions are skipping the copper deployment for end users and going directly to deployment of wireless infrastructure. In more established economies, it is not uncommon to have 1 IP address in use at home for broadband, one in the office, one on your mobile device, etc. 4 or 5 IP's per person, 7 Billion people = 40 or 50 Bill IP addresses would be helpful, and this doesn't even count servers in data centers, virtual machines, clouds, etc. 4.3 billion is looking very tight even with just today's applications.
Incorrect. Blocks allocated prior to ARIN are still maintained in the ARIN database accordingly to community policies. This includes processing contract, updates, being reclaimed, etc.
/John
John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN
If it''s registered in the ARIN service region, then its subject to policies developed by the community in this region for transfers. Go to www.arin.net and click on "Got IPv4 Addresses" for details.
Thanks! /John
I saw a presentation given by the president of ARIN recently on the Research Channel. He predicted that IPV6 and IPV4 will run in parallel for about a decade, so I don't see corporations giving up their IPV4 address space anytime soon.
The fact that I said it doesn't make it true, but I definitely believe that there will be many organizations running IPv4 internally for years to come, and it's only when its commonplace to use IPv6 will organizations think about turning off IPv4. Your mileage may vary.
/John
President and CEO, ARIN
We first need to get BGP on board - only a small percentage of ASNs are announcing both ipv4 and ipv6 space.
If i was supreme dictator of the internet I would tell ARIN that in 7 years, no multihomed ASN renewals would be accepted unless the ASN announces at least one prefix in IPv6.
By doing this you would force the core network infrastructure to begin migrating and userland would eventually follow...
Steveb - No supreme dictator, but there is an ARIN policy process and *anyone* in the community can submit proposals... https://www.arin.net/policy/pdp.html
"Many network experts argue we're nearing network armageddon, but they've been saying that for years." Say what?
"Network armageddon" is already here and we've been living in it for years. The horrors of NAT, the crampedness of addresses making configuration a pain, public addresses expensive, and so on. It's just not been a sudden catastrophe, it's been more like boiling a live frog by putting it in cold water and then slowly heating it.
Slight difference... ISPs can still get (today) fresh blocks of IPv4 addresses. That *will* end in about one year, and then you'll see layers of NAT as you've never seen them before...
It's true that for the average network manager, IPv6 is likely a non-event for some time. There's no particular reason to upgrade your internal infrastructure to IPv6, unless you run across an application that requires it.
However, the public Internet is going to IPv6; the principle reason it hasn't happened (despite IPv6 being standard and available since 1999) is that the problem solved by IPv6 is running out of globally unique IPv4 addresses, and that's only happening next year. Look at the work being done by Global Crossing, NTT, Verizon, Google, Comcast, Facebook and others and you'll see that this is not a fad, it's a significant change that's going to happen slowly over the next few years.
For this reason, the typical network manager does need to look at the external servers (those outside the wonderful NAT) and decide when they'll add IPv6 addresses to those servers that are IPv4-only today. Why bother adding IPv6? It's simple: new broadband customers globally are going to start being connected via IPv6 (out of necessity) and if you want the same end-to-end connectivity you enjoy today, adding IPv6 to your public servers is the quickest route. The alternative is accessing via central carrier-sized NAT devices, which really have unknown performance at scale.
This has audio/video streaming, games, geolocation and other implications.
Petermgreen - We actually agree in one sense: the goal is to make sure that the public *servers* have unique addresses. It's not very difficult for corporate and hosting firms to make their public web sites IPv6 reachable in addition to IPv6. We're not talking about 99% of the home users or servers internal to the corporate firewall, just the public servers. Once there's critical mass in dual-homed public web content, it's possible for fiber/cable/broadband carriers to connect customers with IPv6 and dynamic IPv4 NAT for the remainder of the content.
RLH - Excellent points. Presently, the theory is that if you've got unused address space, you should return it so that other organizations that have need can be assigned it. This actually has happened (again, http://blog.icann.org/2008/02/recovering-ipv4-address-space/) but realistically, may not be the most popular route. In 2009, the community adopted a transfer policy which allows one party to transfer their address blocks to another (and be compensated independent of ARIN) but the receiving party has to prove the documented need to receive it. Since there's still addresses in the free pool, there's not a lot of reason for someone to pay when ARIN will provide them directly the same space once they've documented their need. FYI.
Transfers outside of the community adopted policies are fraud, report them here https://www.arin.net/resources/fraud/ and watch the resources be reclaimed. To the extent that you think the policy should/should not be changed, then get involved on the ARIN public policy process https://www.arin.net/participate/index.html./John
DJB is correct, in that the IETF considered it outside their scope to do a "transition plan for the Internet"... This means that instead of having one standard model for how to get to IPv6, we've seen a veritable parade of transition and coexistence technologies. The combination of no clear transition plan plus no new end-user features makes deployment of IPv6 challenging, and I noted the same thing 15 years ago in RFC 1669. Despite all of the above, IPv6 remains the only viable answer if we want to keep growing the Internet.
You're correct... I'm careful to point out the uncertainty when doing the interviews, but reporters tend to lock onto the IPv4 depletion countdown number regardless...
Actually assignments from RIR's to customers are shown here: <http://www.nro.org/documents/presentations/nro-jointstats_03-31-09.pdf>, on page 4.
This has been growing steadily, and was more than 12/8 equivalents. This indeed is not "12 to 14", but shows that the reclamation of several 'Class A" addresses would still only give us more months, not years.
Anyone who says we're running out of IPv4 addresses needs to go back and look at what is actually allocated and what isn't.
Done. Note that we've been averaging between 10 and 15/8 blocks assigned per year in total space, which using very simply math against a total of 31 means we have a short number of years. If you'd like to see the actual assignment numbers and some more advanced models, go here: http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html.
With respect to use of the 16 Reserved-for-Future-Use blocks, please review http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-fuller-240space-02; it is not certain if this space will be made available for public use or for private reserved use.
Yes, you can have the very same server answer IPv6 queries as well as IPv4, you just need to add IPv6 interface to the server and make sure the particular server software knows how to bind to IPv6 address.
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For the last 10 years I have read: "Yes, IPv4 addresses are running out.. blaa FUD blaa blaa FUD" So far nothing has happened. Most computers out there are NAT'ed so, please stop spreading FUD.
And indeed, they have been running out for the past ten years - look at slide 5 from this presentation: https://www.arin.net/knowledge/v4_deplete_v6_adopt.pdf The fact is that ISPs and hosting companies are having to now undergo major changes in order to continue to grow. The fact that we've known this was coming and developed IPv6, gotten into every major OS and the gear of every major network equipment manufacturer is simply good preparation for what's to come.
In this stage, APNIC has a fixed block of address space reserved and available under a special policy for new and emerging service providers, but that doesn't help one much if you're a existing telecomm company who had been getting tens of thousands of addresses every few months in order to grow - you can now longer obtain additional blocks and now must scramble to come up with an alternative (such as IPv6) if you want to keep growing. More info - http://www.apnic.net/community/ipv4-exhaustion/exhaustion-and-network-operators
There is a finite number of IPv4 address (2**32, aka approx 4.3 billion)... There are 7 billion people on the planet today, and most want an always on smartphone, and a home computer, and a computer at work, etc. This doesn't consider the demand for office servers, data centers, cloud services, etc. The reality is that the depletion of the free pool doesn't mean we run out, but it does start us on the path of higher and higher utilization of these 4.3B numbers. At some point, it becomes very difficult to get additional addresses because all of the relatively easily recovered address space has been redeployed. For an ISP, this won't be 2012, but there's no assurance that its not going to happen very quickly in the next few years.
I don't know what your source of information is, but i recall a previous announcement that no more IPv4 address were being provided, and that only IPv6 were being given out.
If that is true, then we are already out of the IPv4 addresses. and the big IPv6 potential doomsday has already come and gone.
It's worth reading the original article referenced in the post... The central free pool of IPv4 address space ran out on 3 February 2011. The Asia Pacific region (under the APNIC registry) ran out of address space for issuance per their standard policies at the start of summer. RIPE (serving Europe) is likely to run out in this spring, and ARIN is likely to run out in early 2013. Telecommunication companies and ISPs rely on getting additional address space from their regional registry, and if they can't get any more IPv4 space, they either need to stop adding new customers, scavenge IPv4 space from elsewhere, or use IPv6 for new customers.
they have 65 + million ipv4 addresses....
Registrations are publicly visible in the WHOIS database, so please elaborate which address blocks you refer to?
Only parties with operational need can obtain address space, whether that's directly from the Internet number registries or via transfer from an existing address holder.
Correct. If you received IPv4 address space directly from one of the Internet number registries (whether that was IANA, or the InterNIC, or a regional Internet registry), the address space is assigned to you and can be transferred to another party according to the policies of the registry serving your region. If you received address space from your ISP, it's quite likely that the ISP is only providing it to you as a component of service and will recover them if you leave or change providers.
( Here's an example of lessons learned - this message from Facebook Engineering http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150198443513920 )
World IPv6 Day came to an end earlier today. We successfully enabled IPv6 on our site for 24 hours, with great results. We saw over 1 million users reach us over IPv6.
We’re pleased that we did not see any increase in the number of users seeking help from our Help Center. The estimated 0.03% of users who may have been affected would have experienced slow page loads during the test.
Based on the encouraging results, we’ve decided to leave our Developer site dual-stacked, supporting both IPv4 and IPv6. And we will continue to adapt our entire code base and tools to support IPv6.
We are glad to have joined with the Internet Society, major Web companies, and other industry players to enable IPv6 for this test day. It was a great opportunity to test our infrastructure and IPv6 readiness.
IPv6 is vital to the continued growth of the Internet, and World IPv6 Day was a great step in the advancement of the protocol. We hope the overall success of the 24 hour test will encourage others in the industry to establish reliable IPv6 connectivity and develop robust IPv6 products.
I think arin needs to be a little less lax about their assignments btw.. you can get a /20 with two linksys routers and an ipad these days..
Sase - anyone may submit proposals to change ARIN's policies... Go to www.arin.net/policy for details on doing so.
7 Billion people on the planet... While many today do not have Internet connectivity, that's changing rapidly where some regions are skipping the copper deployment for end users and going directly to deployment of wireless infrastructure. In more established economies, it is not uncommon to have 1 IP address in use at home for broadband, one in the office, one on your mobile device, etc. 4 or 5 IP's per person, 7 Billion people = 40 or 50 Bill IP addresses would be helpful, and this doesn't even count servers in data centers, virtual machines, clouds, etc. 4.3 billion is looking very tight even with just today's applications.
Incorrect. Blocks allocated prior to ARIN are still maintained in the ARIN database accordingly to community policies. This includes processing contract, updates, being reclaimed, etc.
/John
John Curran President and CEO
ARIN
If it''s registered in the ARIN service region, then its subject to policies developed by the community in this region for transfers. Go to www.arin.net and click on "Got IPv4 Addresses" for details.
/John
Thanks!
John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN
I saw a presentation given by the president of ARIN recently on the Research Channel. He predicted that IPV6 and IPV4 will run in parallel for about a decade, so I don't see corporations giving up their IPV4 address space anytime soon.
The fact that I said it doesn't make it true, but I definitely believe that there will be many organizations running IPv4 internally for years to come, and it's only when its commonplace to use IPv6 will organizations think about turning off IPv4. Your mileage may vary.
/John
President and CEO, ARIN
We first need to get BGP on board - only a small percentage of ASNs are announcing both ipv4 and ipv6 space. If i was supreme dictator of the internet I would tell ARIN that in 7 years, no multihomed ASN renewals would be accepted unless the ASN announces at least one prefix in IPv6. By doing this you would force the core network infrastructure to begin migrating and userland would eventually follow...
Steveb - No supreme dictator, but there is an ARIN policy process and *anyone* in the community can submit proposals... https://www.arin.net/policy/pdp.html
"Many network experts argue we're nearing network armageddon, but they've been saying that for years." Say what? "Network armageddon" is already here and we've been living in it for years. The horrors of NAT, the crampedness of addresses making configuration a pain, public addresses expensive, and so on. It's just not been a sudden catastrophe, it's been more like boiling a live frog by putting it in cold water and then slowly heating it.
Slight difference... ISPs can still get (today) fresh blocks of IPv4 addresses. That *will* end in about one year, and then you'll see layers of NAT as you've never seen them before...
It's true that for the average network manager, IPv6 is likely a non-event for some time. There's no particular reason to upgrade your internal infrastructure to IPv6, unless you run across an application that requires it.
However, the public Internet is going to IPv6; the principle reason it hasn't happened (despite IPv6 being standard and available since 1999) is that the problem solved by IPv6 is running out of globally unique IPv4 addresses, and that's only happening next year. Look at the work being done by Global Crossing, NTT, Verizon, Google, Comcast, Facebook and others and you'll see that this is not a fad, it's a significant change that's going to happen slowly over the next few years.
For this reason, the typical network manager does need to look at the external servers (those outside the wonderful NAT) and decide when they'll add IPv6 addresses to those servers that are IPv4-only today. Why bother adding IPv6? It's simple: new broadband customers globally are going to start being connected via IPv6 (out of necessity) and if you want the same end-to-end connectivity you enjoy today, adding IPv6 to your public servers is the quickest route. The alternative is accessing via central carrier-sized NAT devices, which really have unknown performance at scale. This has audio/video streaming, games, geolocation and other implications.
Petermgreen - We actually agree in one sense: the goal is to make sure that the public *servers* have unique addresses. It's not very difficult for corporate and hosting firms to make their public web sites IPv6 reachable in addition to IPv6. We're not talking about 99% of the home users or servers internal to the corporate firewall, just the public servers. Once there's critical mass in dual-homed public web content, it's possible for fiber/cable/broadband carriers to connect customers with IPv6 and dynamic IPv4 NAT for the remainder of the content.
RLH - Excellent points. Presently, the theory is that if you've got unused address space, you should return it so that other organizations that have need can be assigned it. This actually has happened (again, http://blog.icann.org/2008/02/recovering-ipv4-address-space/) but realistically, may not be the most popular route. In 2009, the community adopted a transfer policy which allows one party to transfer their address blocks to another (and be compensated independent of ARIN) but the receiving party has to prove the documented need to receive it. Since there's still addresses in the free pool, there's not a lot of reason for someone to pay when ARIN will provide them directly the same space once they've documented their need. FYI.
Transfers outside of the community adopted policies are fraud, report them here https://www.arin.net/resources/fraud/ and watch the resources be reclaimed. To the extent that you think the policy should/should not be changed, then get involved on the ARIN public policy process https://www.arin.net/participate/index.html. /John
DJB is correct, in that the IETF considered it outside their scope to do a "transition plan for the Internet"... This means that instead of having one standard model for how to get to IPv6, we've seen a veritable parade of transition and coexistence technologies. The combination of no clear transition plan plus no new end-user features makes deployment of IPv6 challenging, and I noted the same thing 15 years ago in RFC 1669. Despite all of the above, IPv6 remains the only viable answer if we want to keep growing the Internet.
We have been working on getting those with unneeded legacy blocks to return them, and have had some success: http://blog.icann.org/2008/02/recovering-ipv4-address-space/
You're correct... I'm careful to point out the uncertainty when doing the interviews, but reporters tend to lock onto the IPv4 depletion countdown number regardless...
Actually assignments from RIR's to customers are shown here:
/8 equivalents. This indeed is not "12 to 14", but shows that the reclamation of several 'Class A" addresses would still only give us more months, not years.
<http://www.nro.org/documents/presentations/nro-jointstats_03-31-09.pdf>, on page 4.
This has been growing steadily, and was more than 12
Anyone who says we're running out of IPv4 addresses needs to go back and look at what is actually allocated and what isn't.
Done. Note that we've been averaging between 10 and 15 /8 blocks assigned per year in total space, which using very simply math against a total of 31 means we have a short number of years. If you'd like to see the actual assignment numbers and some more advanced models, go here: http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html.
With respect to use of the 16 Reserved-for-Future-Use blocks, please review http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-fuller-240space-02; it is not certain if this space will be made available for public use or for private reserved use.
Yes, you can have the very same server answer IPv6 queries as well as IPv4, you just need to add IPv6 interface to the server and make sure the particular server software knows how to bind to IPv6 address.
The particular ISOC survey document which started this thread has a fairly long list of resources at the end of it which might be helpful, but here's a few to get you started: http://www.6diss.org/, http://www.getipv6.info/ and http://www.ipv6tf.org/