Geoff Huston has published a detailed look at how the last /8 allocation and the subsequent IANA returned blocks are being used and announced by organizations in the Asia-Pacific region.
Category Archives: APNIC
IP addresses in 2014
Geoff Huston has posted his 2014 version of his IP addressing report. A few notes from within the report.
- Cisco, Morgan Stanely, & Gartner predicted that by 2020 there will be between 25 – 75 billion devices on the Internet as the “Internet of things” comes to life with embedded devices all requiring connections.
- LacNIC, RIPE, and APNIC’s austerity address pools are slated to be depleted between 2017-2021 if current trends continue to hold.
- IPv4 transfers increased quite dramatically in 2014 with APNIC performing 340 a 220% increase, and RIPE 919 a 600% increase. RIPE’s increasing transfers seem to be clearly being driven by the lack of needs-basis requirements in the region.
- LacNIC and RIPE continue to lead the world in IPv6 allocations with 1,208 and 2,218 respectively.
LacNIC reaches /9, triggering IANA reclaimed block distribution
On May 20th, LacNIC announced that it has reached the equivalent of a /9 remaining in its IPv4 free pool which has triggered the IANA to invoke its reclaimed IPv4 address space policy. The IANA received a number of blocks from various RIRs under the reclaimed policy over the years. Under the global policy for reclaimed blocks, each RIR is allocated 1/5th of the total pool. Now that the first initial allocation has been made the IANA reclaimed free pool will be reevaluated every six months and appropriate distributions will then be made to each RIR.
LacNIC received the block (45.160.0.0/11) and will continue with its current allocation policies with some additional scrutiny until the free pool reaches a equivalent of a /10, then only blocks between /22 and /24 will be allocated.
APNIC has subsequently announced that they have received a /11 equivalent from the IANA as part of the reclaimed distribution. Under APNIC policies, each APNIC member is eligible to receive up to a /22 of additional IPv4 address space from this specific block.
RIPE has sent an email to its member list which notes it has received 45.128.0.0/11 from IANA and has added this block to its free pool. Under the current RIPE policy each LIR can receive a single /22 block.
ARIN has not yet announced that they have received an additional block, but the IANA registry notes they have received 45.32.0.0/11. As ARIN does not have a specific policy for this block so it should be added to the available free pool. ARIN’s current pool lists 0.86 /8s equivalent remaining on May 21st.
I have introduced a policy proposal (ARIN-2014-16) to the ARIN region which would designated IANA reclaimed blocks to be allocated under an austerity policy, but this policy is currently in only at the draft stage of discussion on the public policy mailing list.
Addressing 2013
Geoff Huston recently released his 2013 IP addressing report. A few notable details from the report.
- Device shipments for 2014 are expected to reach 2.47 Billion, each of those devices will need at least one IP address.
- The industry continues to show consolidation of Internet numbering resources into the largest service and enterprise providers.
- Geoff’s exhaustion model has ARIN’s IPv4 exhaustion date occurring with a 80% probability between Sept 2014 – June 2015. (I personally think it will be sooner rather than later)
- IPv6 allocations continue to grow with the RIPE region leading the world with 2,149 allocations of 4,018 total allocations in 2013 across all five RIRs.
Geoff concludes with the following insights:
The past three years has been dominated by the mass marketing of mobile internet services, and the growth rates for 2013 perhaps might have been the highest so far recorded were it not for the exhaustion of the IPv4 address pools in the Asia Pacific region and Europe and the Middle East. In address terms this growth is being masked by the use of Carrier Grade NATs in the mobile service provider environment, so that the resultant demands for public addresses in IPv4 are quite low.
Unfortunately no such broad scale of deployment of IPv6 was visible in the address statistics for 2013. This points to a mobile Internet whose continued growth in 2013 remains, for the most part, highly reliant on NATs, and this, in turn, points to some longer term elements of concern for the continued ability of the Internet to support further innovation and diversification in its portfolio of applications and services.
We are witnessing an industry that is no longer using technical innovation, openness and diversification as its primary means of propulsion. The widespread use of NATs limit the technical substrate of the Internet to a very restricted model of simple client/server interactions using TCP and UDP. The use of NATs force the interactions into client-initiated transactions, and the model of an open network with considerable flexibility in the way in which communications took place is no longer being sustained.
Today’s internet is serviced by a far smaller number of very large players, each of whom appear to be assuming a very strong position within their respective markets. The drivers for such larger players tend towards risk aversion, conservatism and increased levels of control across their scope of operation.
2012 IP Address Statistics
Geoff Huston has published his annual look at IP address allocation and assignment statistics.
Addressing 2012: Another One Bites the Dust (copy)
Plenty of numbers in the report to take a look at… Notably, we saw ARIN’s 2012 (45 million) allocation rate increase back to its 2010 rate after falling dramatically in 2011 (23.5 million). RIPE allocated its last IPv4 blocks under its “regular” allocation scheme in mid-September 2012 and moved into the IPv4 exhaustion phase of allocations. In the RIPE region, there wasn’t an apparent “run-on-the-bank” increase in the allocation rate as the registry moved into the exhaustion phase.
Here Geoff’s updated RIR Address Exhaustion Model shows ARIN moving into the exhaustion phase in mid-2014 with LACNIC in late 2014. AFRINIC’s trend-line currently points to an exhaustion point 9 years from January 2013.
Another interesting statistic found in the report is that the total number of smart phones and tablets purchased during 2012 amounts to almost 779 million units. If each of those devices used a native IPv4 address that would use up 21% of the total IPv4 address space.
Geoff finishes the report with a somewhat pessimistic outlook for the Internet industry.
We are witnessing an industry that is no longer using technical innovation, openness and diversification as its primary means of propulsion. The widespread use of NATs limit the technical substrate of the Internet to a very restricted model of simple client/server interactions using TCP and UDP. The use of NATs force the interactions into client-initiated transactions, and the model of an open network with considerable flexibility in the way in which communications took place is no longer being sustained. Today’s internet is serviced by a far smaller number of very large players, each of whom appear to be assuming a very strong position within their respective markets. The drivers for such larger players tend towards risk aversion, conservatism and increased levels of control across their scope of operation. The same trends of market aggregation are now appearing in content provision, where a small number of content providers are exerting a dominant position across the entire Internet.
This changing makeup of the Internet industry has quite profound implications in terms of network neutrality, the separation of functions of carriage and service provision, investment profiles and expectations of risk and returns on infrastructure investments, and on the openness of the Internet itself.