IPv4 Markets

IPv6: Penny Wise and Pound Foolish

The theory put forward by the IETF was simple enough... while there were still enough IPv4 addresses, use transition technologies to migrate to dual stack and then wean IPv4 off over time. All nice and tidy. The way engineers, myself included, liked it. However those controlling the purse strings had a different idea. more

The Short History of the Internet: From ARPANET to the Metaverse

Last Saturday marked the 53rd anniversary of the Internet. While the vast majority of its five billion users have been online for less than a decade, the Internet was taken into use on October 29th, 1969, when two computers connected to the ARPANET exchanged a message. Although the Internet has been around for a while, it remained below most people's radar until the late 1990s when the dot com boom started. more

How Many IPv4 Addresses Does the RIPE NCC Have Left?

Since IANA ran out of IPv4 addresses, people are increasingly aware of how short the remaining lifetime of IPv4 is. With World IPv6 Day taking place this week, the issue has come into even sharper focus. Since March 2011, the RIPE NCC has been publishing the size of its pool of available IPv4 addresses. All five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) regularly publish the status of their IPv4 address pools. In the image below, you can see how the number of IPv4 addresses in the RIPE NCC pool changes over time. more

An IPv6 Update for 2020

The Australian Domain Name Administration, AUDA, recently published its quarterly report for the last quarter of 2020. The report contained the interesting snippet: "The rapid digitization of our lives and economy -- necessitated by COVID-19 -- continued to underpin strong growth in .au registrations. New .au domains created in December 2020 were up 23 percent from December 2019, while total domains under management were up more than 2.1 percent over the same period." more

Psst - Interested in Some Lightly-Used IP Addresses?

The Internet Service Provider (ISP) community is carefully watching the impending depletion of the unassigned IPv4 address pool. Most estimates place the depletion of the central pool of unassigned IPv4 addresses by mid-2011. After that, each Regional Internet Registry (RIR) will continue to satisfy requests for additional IPv4 space for a limited time (depending on the rate of incoming requests and the amount of address space on hand in the RIR at the time of central pool depletion). more

IPv4: Business As Usual

This year, we expect that the RIPE NCC's pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses will reach the "last /8", meaning that we have 16,777,216 IPv4 addresses left in the available pool. At that point it will no longer be possible for RIPE NCC members to obtain the amount of IPv4 addresses they will require to expand their current and future networks. When we hit the last /8, the RIPE NCC will only be able to distribute IPv6 addresses and a one-off allocation of IPv4 address space... Has this caused a last minute rush? more

Is it Finally Time to Eliminate Needs-Based IPv4 Transfer Policies?

Two weeks before depletion of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) IPv4 free pool in September 2015, we published an article recommending that the ARIN community adopt transfer policies that encourage trading transparency and improve whois registry accuracy. By eliminating needs justification as a pre-condition to updating the registry, we argued that ARIN could eliminate existing policy-based barriers that have kept many otherwise lawful and legitimate commercial transactions in the shadows. more

What Digital Divide on IP Addresses?

I took an instant dislike to The Digital Divide on IP Addresses post for some reason, well for many reasons actually. First and foremost is that the implication that the "digital divide" is somehow caused by IP address allocation policies. While it is certainly true that there are "digital divides" between developed and developing parts of the world, the historical imbalance in IP addressing is not one of them. The fact is that while we will "run out" of IPv4 addresses at some point in the not too distant future, there are an unimaginably large number of IPv6 addresses available. more

AfPIF 2016 Diaries: 7th African Peering and Interconnection Forum

The 7th African Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF) took place in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, from 30 August - 1 September 2016. AfPIF is the annual conference organised by the Internet Society to specifically address interconnection challenges together with the wide-ranging opportunities the African continent offers. Tanzania is well-known for its safari, Mount Kilimanjaro and beautiful Zanzibar beaches, but not only that... more

Internet Governance for Sustainability

Sustainability is a difficult term to avoid these days. With that in mind, it's somewhat surprising that last week's European Dialogue on Internet Governance (EuroDIG), now in its tenth year, featured one of its first workshops looking at the subject. But while the workshop focused on issues of energy usage and e-waste, the concept of sustainability raises some much broader and likely difficult questions for the Internet governance community. more

Cloud Security Hinges on IP Addressing

In the first part of this trilogy, I discussed the importance of automatically provisioned second generation DNS in connection with Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC). In the second post, I talked about IP addressing, private enterprise networks, and how DHCP does not meet the requirements of multitenant Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud environments. I will now wrap up this trilogy by putting these two thesis into real-life context. more

Declaring IPv4 “Historic”

At the IETF 95 meeting at the start of April, I was in a meeting of the IPv4 Sunset Working Group, and heard Lee Howard, Director of Network Technology at Time Warner Cable, present on a proposal that recommended that IP version 4, or to be specific, that the technical protocol specification documented in RFC 791, be declared "Historic"... The rationale for this proposed re-designation of IPv4 was that this protocol has indeed been superseded by a more recent specification, namely IP version 6. more

IP Addresses as Money

It's no secret that the supply of IPv4 addresses, on which the Internet has been based since the dawn of digital time, is rapidly running out. The official replacement is much larger IPv6 addresses, but I can report from experience that the task of switching is not trivial, and for a long time there will be a lot of the net that's only on IPv4. So once the initial supply of IPv4 addresses run out, and the only way to get some is to buy them from someone else, what will the market be like? more

The IPv4 Market: 2017 and Beyond

The IPv4 market has grown significantly in the last four years. It finished particularly strong in 2017, both in terms of the total volume of addresses traded and overall number of intra- and inter-RIR transactions in the ARIN region. Over the last four years, the steady and sometimes substantial growth in the number of transactions has been mostly attributable to a dramatic increase in small block trades of fewer than 4,000 addresses. more

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. more