The world is ending. the IPocalypse is upon us! As I (and a lot of other people) have been warning for a while now, North America has finally run out of new IPv4 addresses. The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the group that distributes Internet addresses for North America, said Thursday it has assigned the last addresses in its IPv4 free pool.
IPv4 dates back to 1981 and only has room for 4.3 billion unique addresses. IPv6, introduced in 1999, should have enough addresses to serve Internet users for generations, according to ARIN.
Anyone who still needs IPv4 addresses can request them from ARIN, but they won’t have any to give away unless it gets more from the global Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) or returned addresses from users who don’t need them anymore.
According to PCWorld, ARIN already runs a waiting list for requests, which they set up earlier this year. Users can also buy IPv4 addresses on the IPv4 grey market (rb- I first reported on the IPv4 grey market in 2011) from others who don’t need them and are looking to make some money. Addresses recently were going for around US$10-$12 each, according to people who follow the transfer market.
PC World speculates that more North American addresses may go on the grey market now that ARIN has exhausted its pool of fresh ones. That event triggered a change in the organization’s rules for approving transfers: There is no longer any restriction on how often an address holder can request transfers to specified recipients.
North American is just the latest to run out of IP addresses according to the Register.
- APNIC, which allocates addresses in Asia-Pacific, ran out of available IPv4 addresses in 2011;
- RIPE, which oversees Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Central Asia, ran out in 2012; and
- LACNIC, which manages Latin America and the Caribbean, ran dry in 2014.
All that’s left is AFRINIC, which oversees Africa, and is expected to run out of IPv4 addresses in 2019.
The IPv4 space globally offers 4,294,967,296 network addresses – which seemed like an awful lot back in the 1970s when the internet was coming together. Vint Cerf, father of the internet, (not Al Gore) told the Register,
When we designed the Internet 40 years ago, we did some calculations and estimated that 4.3 billion terminations ought to be enough for an experiment. Well, the experiment escaped the lab
IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, and there are 3.4 × 1038 available – that’s 340 undecillion, although, practically speaking, 42 undecillion are usable.
Rb-
I told you so again and again and again. Maybe now that North America has run out of new IPv4 addresses, the IPv6 migration might get some attention and pick up speed. Maybe.
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
