IP Allocation Rates

RIPE NCC IPv6 Allocations 2007

The months of October and November 2007 saw an increase in the number of IPv6 allocations made in a single month by the RIPE NCC. There were 24 allocations made to RIPE NCC members in October, a record immediately broken by the 31 allocations made in November. The previous peak was 19 allocations in a single month, which was achieved on three separate occasions in 2003, 2004 and 2007.

IPv4 Allocation Rates

The purpose of this section is to present current and historical information about IPv4 allocation rates. The Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) report on the rates of RIR allocation of IPv4 address space and on the state of the remaining pool of IPv4 address space.

Current Information about IPv4 Allocation Rates:

Unallocated IPv4 Allocation Pools

Geoff Huston, Chief Scientist, APNIC, produces a regularly updated report that gives the latest figures on the global IPv4 address pools. This report offers projections of when the IANA and RIR unallocated IPv4 address pools might run out according to the current data available.

The report is available at:
http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html

The RIPE NCC produced the following reports in 2007:

IPv4 Address Space Allocation Rate: January 2007

The full report is available at:
http://www.ripe.net/info/info-services/ipv4/allocation_report.html

IPv4 Exhaustion and IPv6

RIPE community member Jordi Palet has produced the following document, which examines the issues surrounding IPv4 exhaustion and the transition to IPv6. Jordi has worked prominently in the development, promotion and deployment of IPv6, and has been active in many industry groups, including the IPv6 Forum, the European IPv6 Task Force and the IPv6 Task Force Steering Committee:

• The Choice: IPv4 Exhaustion or Transition to IPv6
  
  

Historical Information about IPv4 Allocation Rates:

The purpose of this information is to archive reports and statements that have been published about IPv4 allocation rates in the past.

The information below comes from a period in 2003 when there was intense focus on IPv4 allocation rates, along with a number of speculative media reports that suggested IPv4 address space was close to being exhausted. The RIPE NCC provided the information below to demonstrate that many of the claims in 2003 about imminent IPv4 address space shortage were speculative and were not based on authoritative, publicly available statistics.

Articles on IPv4:

• RIPE Community Resolution on IPv4 Depletion and Deployment of IPv6 October 2007
  
  
• RIPE NCC Statement on IPv4 Space October 2003
  
  
• IPv4 - Running Out of Time? 2003
  News articles in 2003 suggested we would soon run out of IP addresses. IPv4 provides around 4.4 billion unique IP addresses. The Internet has grown faster than anyone expected, impacting the longevity of this resource.
  Read Full Article   |   Read Summary
  
  
• IPv4 Fast Facts 2003
  To be able to communicate with another networked device, you need to know how to reach it. A unique IP address identifies each device on the Internet. As more people connect to the Internet, these identifying numbers are being used at an increasing rate.
  
  
• IPv4, How long have we got? (PDF) July 2003
  An article by Geoff Huston (Internet Research Scientist at APNIC) which tries to answer the question: "How long can the IPv4 address pool last in the face of a contiunally growing network?".