IP Address News

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Category Archives: RIPE

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.

Addressing 2014 – And then there were 2!  (copy)

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.

Addressing 2013 – That Was The Year That Was  (Copy)

2014 preview and 2013 wrapup

The ARIN region continues to move steadily toward IPv4 exhaustion with the total amount of IPv4 address resources available in the free pool being only 1.4 /8 equivalents as of February 3rd, 2014.  It seems very likely that the region will exhaust its free pool of IPv4 numbers by mid-2014.

With the coming exhaustion, a number of community members have submitted policy proposals dealing with a number of exhaustion issues.  ARIN has recently published these new draft policies and they are now open for discussion.

The RIPE region continues to move toward removing “need” (RIPE policy 2013-3) as a requirement for an IPv4 address assignment or allocation.  The working-group chairs recently forwarded the policy to the RIPE NCC for implementation.

In IPv6 news, Comcast’s continues their aggressive deployment of IPv6 and reported in late 2013 that 25% of their Internet customers are now provisioned with dual stack and plans to complete their IPv6 deployment in 2014.  Comcast also noted that they had reached the 75% deployment throughout their broadband network.  Additional commentary on other cable MSOs can be found here.

At the end of the year, the New York Times also published an intriguing interview with Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn about the future of the Internet entitled, Viewing Where the Internet Goes.

IPv6 Deployment in the UK

I was pointed to this report from OfCom, the UK communications regulator, through this commentary.

The report is dated 2012 and has some interesting statistics comparing the deployment of IPv6 in various countries.

I found the following quote (emphasis mine) from the report interesting as I read through.

The report finds that by any measure, the UK lags behind its peers in IPv6 deployment. Whether in comparison with; economies of a similar size, G20 and EU member states, or with Asian economies, the UK is behind in IPv6 adoption.  IPv4 address exhaustion and a failure to transition to IPv6 has a significant impact on innovation as it is the essential building block for any technology that connects to the Internet. Failure to keep up with competitor economies will have an impact on the UK’s consumer access to broadband, on eGovernment, […]

The report includes a brief discussion of the IPv4 exhaustion & transfer market, IPv6 deployment experiences, and deployment costs.

Internet Protocol Version 6 Deployment Study  (copy)