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.