IPv4 Markets

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

Implications of DoD IPv6 Mandate on IPv4 Market

Recent Department of Defense IPv4 activity and announcements about IPv6 indicate a shift in their perspective and suggest potential impacts on the IPv4 address market. The shift could include the release of up to 175 million IPv4 addresses in the coming years, creating a risk of a glut in the market. For perspective, the market has transferred 380 million addresses over eleven years. 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

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

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

1,000th /22 Allocated from Last /8

On 14 September 2012, the RIPE NCC began allocating IPv4 address space from the last /8 we received from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). Nobody was entirely sure what would happen when we reached this point. Would there be a "run on the bank" for this final block of addresses? 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

The Hidden Value of IPv4 Addresses

All devices that connect to the internet need unique addresses. The number of IP addresses is limited, creating a demand for addresses worldwide, particularly from the cloud computing industry. This demand has raised the value of IPv4 to levels that the internet's original developers didn't predict, in part because the internet was considered an experiment at the time. Of course, use - and so demand -- has exceeded anyone's realistic expectations. 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 IPv6 an Internet Standard

I've already shared my thoughts following a session of the IPv4 Sunset Working Group at IETF 95 that considered whether to declare IPv4 an "Historic" specification. Of course, as one would expect for a meeting of a Standards Development Organization (SDO), that wasn't the only standards process discussion through the week. Another session, this time in the IPv6 Maintenance Working Group, considered the related topic of whether to make the IPv6 specification a full Internet Standard. Let's look at that proposal. 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

APNIC Labs Partners with Cloudflare for Joint DNS Research Project

APNIC Labs, the research arm of Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre, is partnering with Cloudflare for a joint research project relating to the operation of the DNS, reports Geoff Huston, APNIC's Chief Scientist. more

IPv6 Answers to Common Questions from Policy Makers, Executives and Other Non-Technical Readers

A factual paper prepared in October 2009 for and endorsed by the Chief Executive Officers of ICANN and all the Regional Internet Registries that provides answers to commonly asked questions about IPv6 such as: How are allocations made, and to whom? How are IPv6 addresses actually being allocated? And why did such large IPv4 address allocations go to US organizations, including the US Government, and its Department of Defense? more