CAIDA has released a new graphic showing the density differences between the IPv4 Internet and the IPv6 Internet.
These IPv4 and IPv6 graphs show the relative growth of the two Internet topologies, and in particular the steady continued growth of the IPv6 topology. Although both IPv4 and IPv6 topologies experienced a lot of churn, the net change in number of ASes was 3,290 (10.7%) in our IPv4 graph and 495 (25.7%) in our IPv6 graph.
Geoff Huston has posted an updated projection on when ARIN will exhaust their IPv4 free pool. While there are numerous caveats around the prediction. His best estimate is sometime in 2014 and likely in the 3rd quarter.
I’ve been taking some vacation in the past month so the posting has been quiet here. Catching up on news, it does not appear there is a lot of notable news in the IP address arena. However, here are a few links & notes that I’ve found catching up on the happenings in the past couple of weeks.
Chris Grundemann has recently posted his commentary on the recent discussions regarding needs assessment for IPv4 that is be done in the RIPE region under policy proposal 2013-03. It will be interesting to see the final outcome of this discussion and policy proposal.
British Telecom (BT) has started a trial of Carrier Grade NAT (CGN) for their “Option 1 Total Broadband” customers. Since the RIPE region has now fully exhausted their IPv4 free pool, these types of IP address sharing schemes just seem inevitable. At this point it seems though IPv4 addressing needs continue to grow faster than the deployments of native IPv6. Unfortunately, IPv6 is not backward compatible with IPv4 and IPv4 addresses will continue to be required for all Internet customers either natively or through some type of transition technology as long as the vast majority of the content they wish to reach remains IPv4 only.