As expected, ARIN was forced to turn away a qualified applicant earlier this week for IPv4 addresses as its stock has been depleted.  The organization was then put on ARIN’s waiting list with hopes that someday it still might get an additional block.  These leaves organizations with the prospect of waiting, using more NAT (network address translation), or purchasing IPv4 blocks from organizations which have excess addresses via the transfer market.

No doubt, we will continue to see calls for increased adoption of IPv6 in the next weeks, but as I’ve written earlier IPv6 in many ways has economic disincentives to deployment.  However, we continue to see the largest broadband and mobile providers continuing their rollout of IPv6 as these organizations are large enough that purchasing additional IPv4 blocks won’t scale over time.

While ARIN has a a few reserved blocks and special purpose blocks, and may receive some small allocations from IANA via the reclaimed address pool, the free pool is now exhausted and organizations can’t expect to obtain IPv4 addresses directly from ARIN.

This leaves the African registry, AfriNIC, as the only registry with an available IPv4 free pool.  As of today, using previous allocation rates, AfriNIC still has until April of 2019 before its address pool runs dry. Only time will tell if we see an acceleration of the use of AfriNIC’s pool from economic incentives outside the region.

I’ll update this post with articles from other locations with interesting takes on the event.

• We’ve finally hit the breaking point for the original Internet

• It’s official: North America out of new IPv4 addresses

• The Internet has run out of IP addresses (sort of)

• North America down to its last ~130,000 IPv4 addresses

• The Internet Is Now Officially Too Big as IP Addresses Run Out