Today the pool of IPv4 addresses dropped below 5% of the total IPv4 address space. The cause was the allocation of two blocks of IPv4 addresses to APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for the Asia Pacific region by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). The speed with which IPv4 addresses is being consumed is demonstrated by it being only 9 months ago that the remaining space dropped below 10%.
There are now only twelve blocks available for allocation. The first seven of these blocks will be allocated under the normal allocation policy. Once these are assigned, the final five blocks will immediately be assigned, one to each RIR.
At current depletion rates, the IPv4 pool will be exhausted early in 2011.
The solution to the address space exhaustion is IPv6, the next generation of the Internet Protocol. All organisations need to take seriously the deployment of IPv6 to avoid a chaotic migration at the last moment.
This entry was posted on Monday, October 18th, 2010 at 2:08 pm and is filed under IPv6, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.