And so it ends. With a ceremony in Miami. You can see the 13-minute video and also the press conference a little later here.
Also see my Ars Technica story: River of IPv4 addresses officially runs dry. Also see my story about World IPv6 Day on june 8 on Ars a few days earlier. Google, Yahoo and Facebook want to enable IPv6 for a day and then turn it off again. Not good enough.
With no more IPv4 addresses in IANA's global pool, and no policies for redistributing address space between the five RIRs in place (yet), each RIR is going to run out at its own rate. This will happen soon for APNIC, which is burning through address space at an unprecedented rate: 23.7 million addresses in january alone, about what APNIC used in a year in 2000 - 2002. As you can see on the statistics page, at this rate, they would burn through their remaining address space in three more months, and then one extra month for the legacy space administered by them. However, it's unclear who really gets to use the legacy space, and most RIRs have set aside their final /8 allocation or part of it for special purposes.
RIPE should have more than a year according to these numbers, but Geoff Huston and Tony Hain have different projections. Geoff's image shows bars that indicate the chance of the RIR in question running out that month. Tony also has a zoomed graph that shows the APNIC and RIPE NCC projected runout dates more clearly.
In the meantime, it's amazing to still hear tons of people say they see no need adopt IPv6. And there's the tired "IPv4 will be around for DECADES" predictions. I'm sure it will be possible to find stuff that can do IPv4 for many, many years, but I'm also quite confident that there will no longer be a meaningful IPv4 deployment on the public internet by the time the year 2020 comes around. In the 1990s, IPX, AppleTalk and DECNET disappeared pretty quickly after everyone connected to the internet. And these were protocols that were useful locally, regardless of external connectivity. Once you need IPv6 to connect to the rest of the world and your work stations are IPv6-enabled, there's really no reason to keep running an IPv4 network anymore. Sure, there will be some IPv4-to-IPv6 translators to allow access to legacy stuff, but routing IPv4 packets will no longer be a useful exercise.
Permalink - posted 2011-02-06
Ars looks at how Egypt "turned off" the Internet within its borders and whether that could be accomplished in countries like the US and western Europe. The Internet is surprisingly hard to kill, but if a government is willing to power down routers, turn off DNS, and kill interconnects, it can be done.
Permalink - posted 2011-01-30
As of January 1, 2011, the number of unused IPv4 addresses is 495.66 million. Exactly a year earlier, the number of available addresses was 721.06 million. So we collectively used up 225.4 million addresses in 2010.
Permalink - posted 2011-01-04
In 2010, twice as many IPv6 address blocks were given out as in 2009, adding up to 5.5 times as much address space.
Permalink - posted 2011-01-04
Last April, 15 percent of the world's Internet traffic was rerouted through China. Ars delves into the nuts and bolts of how traffic is sent around the 'Net, highlighting some very basic security issues, including one that may have been responsible for April's routing incident.
Permalink - posted 2010-11-24
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We used up 105.57 million addresses in the first half of 2010. So we're on track to beat last year's 203.4 million by a few percent this year. If nothing changes.
Full article / permalink - posted 2010-07-02
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On january first this year, the number of available IPv4 addresses was 722.18 million (see the 2009 IPv4 address report). On july first, this was 616.61 million, made up of 268.44 million addresses in the 16 /8 blocks left in the IANA global pool and 348.17 million given out by IANA to the five Regional Internet Registries that the RIRs haven't given out to end-users yet. So we used up 105.57 million addresses in the first half of 2010. That means we're on track to beat last year's 203.4 million by a few percent this year. If nothing changes.
A problem with determining these numbers is that ARIN "backdates" their address allocations sometimes: when they give out a /16 in 2008 and then another /16 in 2010, this will often show up as a single /15 block with a 2008 allocation date. So just listing all the allocations for a given year would always show a smaller number than the actual decline of the free address pool. Strangely, the opposite is happening currently: the total number of addresses with a jan - jun 2010 allocation date is 108 million, 2.43 million more than the decline of the free address pool. This suggests that at least 2.43 million addresses given out in previous years have been returned in the first half of 2010. This number isn't easily derived from the published numbers, so I'm not going to look into it now. However, I'll look at the returned address space in some detail in the future.
Also interesting: last year, LACNIC gave out 10.98 million addresses and AfriNIC 5.99 million. But halfway through 2010, they're already pretty close to last year's totals: 10.38 and 4.67 million, respectively. China got 50.66 million addresses last year, but is now at 18.96, while Korea got 10.95 million last year and has already bested that at 11.68 million for the first six months of the year.
Permalink - posted 2010-07-02
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