By Campbell Gardiner
The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) has 2.83 /8s of IPv4 space remaining and will run out completely in either the first or second quarter of next year, it was announced today.
Speaking at the 8th annual Australian IPv6 Summit, ARIN President and CEO John Curran reiterated that global depletion has effectively arrived. Each Regional Internet Registry (RIR) received its last /8 (a block of 16 million IPv4 addresses) from IANA on 3 February 2011 and there are no more IPv4 addresses left in the central pool.
Describing IPv4 as the protocol that has led to the success of the Internet, Curran says it’s now time to move on and he took the opportunity to hammer home the importance of IPv6 for all organisations.
“Every organisation, at a minimum, needs to make its servers reachable via IPv4 and IPv6 because the public Internet is now IPv4 and IPv6,” he says. “If you’re only installing a server via IPv4 you’re not reaching the entire Internet and are shortchanging yourself. This also goes for web, mail and applications.”
ISP requests for IPv6 address space have been ramping up steadily in the ARIN region, with most already having approached ARIN with prefix requests. Actual IPv6 assignments show growth in both the end user and ISP realms.
A recent survey of all RIR members – the 2012 NRO Global IPv6 Deployment Survey – shows that IPv6 is gaining traction. 77% of respondants have some IPv6 presence, up from 40% in previous years.
In respect to the IPv4 resale market, ARIN has adopted what it calls ‘specified transfer policies’ where a party can transfer their v4 addresses to another party who needs them.
“We’ve had a lot of uptake,” says Curran. “For those organisations who’ve been asleep at the switch, transfer policies like these act as an airbag for those who haven’t had their IPv6 seatbelts on.
“IPv4 transfer capabilty is important. It will help bring under-utilised IPv4 back into use. But remember that there’s only a one or two year supply in aggregate because the demand is so high.”
Curran also provided a useful summary of IPv6’s history, for the uninitiated. The Internet Engineering Task Force began work on the protocol as early as 1993. It has been completed, tested and available since 1999 and is used and managed in much the same way as IPv4.
IPv6 provides a phenomenal 340 undecillion addresses and, while Curran says RIRs can afford to be generous in allocating IPv6 addresses they must also be careful, “allocating in such a way that ensures IPv6 is the last protocol change we ever make”.
The recent World IPv6 Launch Day did an excellent job of lifting overall IPv6 awareness, says Curran, and he envisions a situation in the not-too-distant-future when people will stop talking about IPv6 deployment and start talking about the whole Internet again.