IPv4 Markets

How a Routing Prefix Travels Through the Internet

What happens when an IP address prefix gets announced or withdrawn. How does this information propagate through the Internet? And how does it affect the amount of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) traffic across the Internet when a single prefix is freshly announced or withdrawn from the global routing table? The following short analysis shows the detailed effects of these two events.

Recent Enhancements to ARIN’s whoIS-RWS Service

ARIN deployed a series of enhancements to its Whois-RWS service today. This includes enabling CIDR support and IPv6 lookups in the search box on the web page, provided plain text rendering of lists of ASNs and networks on the web - plus enhanced CIDR query matching on WHOIS port 43.

The Central IPv4 Pool is Gone

Yesterday, the Asia-Pacific registry got the last two blocks in the central IPv4 pool. The IANA has been sitting on five /8s (one per regional registry), and these will be handed out (along with the fragments from the legacy class B space), one to each registry. The IANA IPv4 registry doesn't yet reflect this.

Global Patterns in IPv4 Allocation Statistics

In January 2007 we highlighted that the IPv4 allocation rate had increased significantly since early 2004. By 2006 it was clear that continued growth would see IPv4 exhaustion occur sometime between 2010 and 2015. In October 2010 we revisited the subject in the CircleID articled 'Graph Shows Decline of IPv4 Almost Linear'. ... Now, in January 2011, we are very close to the exhaustion of the IANA pool of IPv4 address space.

The ISP Industry and the Financial Sector - Amazing Similarities

In the last RIPE Labs article on this subject How Does the Internet Industry Compare?, we looked at ways to compare our industry with other industrial sectors, and identified a number of characteristics that an industry must have in order to be comparable to the Internet industry. It seems the financial sector or monetary credit industry shares many of these characteristics and in fact behaves much like the Internet industry.

Addressing 2010

It's January again, and being the start of another year, it's as good a time as any to look at the last 12 months and see what the Internet was up to in 2010. This is an update to the report prepared 12 months ago when looking at 2009, so lets see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet, and look at how address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself.

How Accurate is the Routing Registry?

The Internet Routing Registry (IRR) is a globally distributed routing information database that consists of several databases run by various organisations. Network operators use the IRR to publish their routing policies and routing announcements in a way that allows other network operators to make use of the data. In addition to making Internet topology visible, the IRR is used by network operators to look up peering agreements, determine optimal policies and to configure their routers.

IPv6 : Rumours Are More Accurate Than Predictions

As rumours tend to be more accurate than predictions, the last /8's are hanging already on this years Christmas tree and one should hurry to get hold of a small little RIR block to put on next year's tree. I will miss the decade of heated and passionate debates between Tony Hain and Geoff Huston on when the exhaustion would actually happen. Estimates ranged all the way from 2008 to 2020 with Tony predicting early demise of IPv4 addresses while Geoff initially thought exhaustion would come later. As time passed the interval converged and here we are.

How Does the Internet Industry Compare?

In an earlier CircleID post (The ISP Industry: Concentrated or Diverse?) we discussed if the ISP industry is concentrated and concluded the industry is amazingly open and varied. This time we try to identify criteria that make other economic sectors comparable to our own industry, using the global automotive manufacturing sector as an example to test our assumptions. Comparing the Internet industry with other industries is interesting, because it is quite special in a number of ways: it is transparent, keeps detailed records and values a high level of industry self-regulation. It also enables organisations to serve a global market.

The Trouble With 6to4

In the transition from IPv4 to IPv6, the preferred solution for network endpoints is to have both native IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity (also called dual-stack connectivity). If a site cannot get native IPv6 connectivity, however, the IPv4 network endpoints can choose from a number of conversion technologies to connect to the IPv6 Internet. The most commonly used conversion mechanisms are 6to4, Teredo and tunnel-brokers. At recent RIPE meetings there have been claims that 6to4 connectivity is quite often broken. We were interested to find out how broken it really is.