The RIPE NCC today announced that they have basically reached the end of their IPv4 reserve pool. When RIPE received its last /8 allocation from IANA they choose to allocate this block in /22 increments to new LIR’s (Local Internet Registries). They have now allocated the last /22 contigious block and are now in the process of allocating equivalently /22s made up of /23 and /24 blocks.

If you thought there was still time at RIPE to get in line as a new applicant to get a /22 unfortunately you likely have missed the boat. RIPE saw a increase in the number of LIR applications (basically a run on the bank as the pool emptied) and noted that due to the back log of applicants some current applicants will likely not receive a /22 but may get a /24 from the wait-list in the future.

https://www.ripe.net/publications/news/about-ripe-ncc-and-ripe/update-approaching-ipv4-run-out

Here at the the RIPE 71 meeting in Bucharest, Romania.  A very interesting presentation was given by one of the IP address brokers about the large scale export of IPv4 addresses from Romania.

According to data from RIPE and Cipiran Nica, 66% of all exported addresses in the RIPE region are from Romania. RO had 13.5M addresses before runout, then exported 5.2 M or more than 1/3 of the total addresses in the country. By contrast the next largest exporter in the region, Germany, was the source of 14% of the RIPE transfers.  This 14%, however, constituted less than 2% of total addresses registered in Germany.  

This export has always seemed a bit of an oddity since it was noted in earlier blog post from Dyn earlier in 2015. 

The presentation at the meeting revealed some of the on the ground details that are not easily explained by the statistics themsevles.  The primary reason so many of these addresses came on to the market was that a majority of the addresses in the country were being rented or were previously used for spam.  Prior to IPv4 exhaustion many RO companies rented addresses due to the cost of becoming a LIR. Additionally, there has been consolidation of the ISPs in the region and as these smaller ISPs were taken over the addreses were returned to the LIRs.  These are the addresses that went into the transfer market along with addresses that were obtained mostly for companies which were doing snowshoe spam. The addresses which were used for spam constituted 68% of exported addresses.  Approximately 30% of the addresses were from formerly rented addresses.

Estimates of actual IPv4 usage from the top 5 companies companies in Romania show that about 4.2M addresses are being used to conver 95% of the Internet access customers in the country.  

It will be interesting to see if this large scale export of IPv4 resources will have a negative effect on the longer term.  A number of the largest providers here are quite agressive in their IPv6 rollouts, but even those require IPv4 to be able to connect end users to the rest of the predominantly IPv4 Internet.

Romania’s Jump to the Number One exporter of IPv4 Addresses