IPv4 Exhaustion

Dist · 3 Feb 2011 at 15:12

So now that today IANA annouced the allocation of the final /8 blocks of IPv4 address space, does anyone have any idea how long it will be until the regional organisations such as ARIN and RIPE exhaust their pool of IPs now that they can't get any more from IANA?

Also, what will be the next big thing to happen in terms of IPv4 exhaustion/IPv6 adoption? I've seen some people talk about carrier grade NAT (the thought of which makes me shudder) but what I don't understand is if things like carrier grade NAT will effect people who have already been assigned a public IPv4 address or if it is something that when implemented will be used on the unused IPv4 addresses that ISPs have to offer?

Mr-White · 3 Feb 2011 at 15:31

Black market for ipv4 addresses

MW

LordAzathoth · 3 Feb 2011 at 15:33

I was wondering as well, can you believe they've known it would happen ages ago and no one cared to make the transition go smoothly

Dist · 3 Feb 2011 at 15:35

I bet all the network admins were hoping that by the time this would become an issue that they would be promoted and that it would be someone elses problem to sort out.

Trifid · 3 Feb 2011 at 15:45

LordAzathoth said:
I was wondering as well, can you believe they've known it would happen ages ago and no one cared to make the transition go smoothly

What is to say it won't go smoothly?

rpstewart · 3 Feb 2011 at 15:49

LordAzathoth said:
I was wondering as well, can you believe they've known it would happen ages ago and no one cared to make the transition go smoothly

There's no commercial benefit in being an early IPV6 adopter hence everyone's had their head in the sand.

What is likely to happen now is a move towards recovering and recycling unused IP ranges. For example IBM owns all the 9. numbers and even considering that every machine on the IBM network gets a 9. address there's still a huge number of spare addresses. Recovering these and others like them will go some way but it's just putting off the inevitable need to move to IPV6.

mrk · 3 Feb 2011 at 15:50

US based ISPs have already started trialling IPV6 so things are moving...

SiriusB · 3 Feb 2011 at 15:58

I imagine new users are the ones to benefit from IPv6, with them getting IPv6 capable routers and such. It's not like the current IPv4 Internet will cease to function.

LordAzathoth · 3 Feb 2011 at 16:03

lol I know it is very unlikely to happen but imagine, having to queue to get an IP address to connect to the internet aaaaaarh.

Rabtech · 3 Feb 2011 at 16:22

Certain ISP's clients still have fun at peak times, as they haven't got enough ip addresses for all there customers

LordAzathoth · 3 Feb 2011 at 16:23

Rabtech said:
Certain ISP's clients still have fun at peak times, as they haven't got enough ip addresses for all there customers

Are you joking, it means they can be potentially in breach of contract.

daz · 3 Feb 2011 at 16:42

All the organisations that were given historical /8s will probably be asked to give them back. It's a legal minefield though.

There's a list here:-
http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml

Quite why the UK Department For Work and Pensions needs 16 million IPs is something entirely.

Edit: I don't even think 51.0.0.0/8 is even being announced.

Theguy · 3 Feb 2011 at 16:55

daz said:
Quite why the UK Department For Work and Pensions needs 16 million IPs is something entirely.

Going cheap at the time most likely..

growse · 3 Feb 2011 at 17:10

daz said:
All the organisations that were given historical /8s will probably be asked to give them back. It's a legal minefield though.

There's a list here:-
http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml

Quite why the UK Department For Work and Pensions needs 16 million IPs is something entirely.

Edit: I don't even think 51.0.0.0/8 is even being announced.

I doubt it, given that we're averaging going through 10 /8's per year (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ipv4-exhaust.svg), and the process of reclaiming or each /8 will take significantly longer than the month and a bit's extra use we'll get out of it.

daz · 3 Feb 2011 at 17:33

Reclaiming old/legacy space plus forcing residential ISPs to use NAT will extend IPv4 usage significantly. I'd be surprised if it wasn't still predominant in 5 years.

daz · 3 Feb 2011 at 18:12

Famous words come five years time when someone digs up these forum archives :cool:

bigredshark · 3 Feb 2011 at 18:56

Khaaan! said:
US based ISPs have already started trialling IPV6 so things are moving...

Trialling? Anybody any good has it live on their network and ready to go today. Responsible ISPs have had it in place for a couple of years now. The question is actually more about the periphery services these days...

Westyfield2 · 3 Feb 2011 at 18:57

daz said:
All the organisations that were given historical /8s will probably be asked to give them back. It's a legal minefield though.

There's a list here:-
http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml

Someone at work showed me a nice pretty picture of it with who owns what represented graphically. Can't find it now though

.

derfderfley · 3 Feb 2011 at 19:02

RIPE has somewhere around 280k /24's left at the moment.
The first of the RIR's to run out of v4 address space will be APNIC (around 300k /24's left) they believe they have around 6-9 months worth of v4 address space left before they are unable to meet requests.
I would expect RIPE to last another 6-9 months on top of that as the European rate of allocation for IP address space is much slower than APNIC.

Basically UK ISP's that haven't, need to start planning now, and start implementation by the middle of the year. Now this will probably be a two pronged attack;
1) Implementation of "carrier grade" NAT to stretch out the last of the v4 space.
Wave goodbye to more that a single static public IP address as a residential customer, and then get ready to be put behind NAT as the business customers that pay big money for their connections will be getting your public IP addresses.

2) Rolling out dual stack connections to all users, residential customer will probably get a /64 IPv6 range, most businesses will be given a /48.

branddaly · 3 Feb 2011 at 19:03

daz said:
Reclaiming old/legacy space plus forcing residential ISPs to use NAT will extend IPv4 usage significantly. I'd be surprised if it wasn't still predominant in 5 years.

I don't think you have too much risk. Its a really hard model to do. Geoff Huston did a presentation some time ago. It was projecting the IPv6 Internet to be 80% of the size of the IPv4 internet by 2017, in terms of AS that are advertising IPv6 prefixes. However thats not really the same as 80% of end users having both protocols in use.

Admittedly I, possibly mistakenly, recall his earlier models for IPv4 exhaustion being nearer 2020, so on that basis IPv6 will probably be bigger than IPv4 by the middle of next year.