As you are hopefully aware IPv4 is on its way out and we reached a major milestone yesterday. Up until monday IANA had seven /8 subnets(that's a a bit under 17 million adresses each) left. On Tuesday APNIC requested another two, which let the number drop to the treshold agreed upon in advance on which the remaining five subnets will be distributed, one to each of the RIR's(Regional Internet Registries). That means yesterday every RIR got one last /8 Block, APNIC got three and that's it. Every IPv4 address that willl be requested once these blocks have been used up will have to come from some previous allotment.
How long will this last on the RIR level?
First you have to look at the rate with which the addresses were given out until now. As you can see the rate was about 10 /8's per year, of which only a neglegible amount was used by AFRINIC(Africa) and LACNIC(South America) (overestimate with 10%). On average RIPE(Europe) and ARIN(North America) use about equal amounts and together about as much as APNIC(Asia and Pacific) does. So that means APNIC, RIPE and ARIN will need about 4.5, 2.25 and 2.25 /8 networks over the course of next year if demand stays exactly the same.
Given that the good is becoming rarer this is unlikely as consumers will probably start hoarding. So given this increase in demand and estimating RIPE and ARIN to have a spare of about 1 /8 left over that would mean APNIC will be the first RIR to run out for good until September at the latest, shortly followed by RIPE and ARIN. LACNIC will likely run out early 2012 and AFRINIC probably will last longest given their low local demand.
What happens then?
Most likely it will be an ugly patchwork of a routing mess and a rather small bazaar for the unused parts of previous allocation that were simply to big for the organization getting them to be used up sensibly. I don't think this will scale to very small subnets since this will put too much demand on the routing infrastructure, so this market is a lot smaller than a lot of people estimate right now, although it will surely be amusing.
Apart from that there will be a rush to get IPv6 out to the public which will fail in a lot of entertaining ways and i am certain will be blamed on the short time frame that this had to be done in (a ludicrous claim that will be uttered for sure). A minor number of people will sit in the dark and wonder why a few websites won't work but overall won't notice anything wrong.
What does it mean?
PARTY! The dog days are over. Well at least to some degree I hope. I am really looking forward to what will hopefully be a global shared address space with hopefully less routing issues, NATing, masquerading and all that other fun stuff. I am sure someone will come up with some unbelievable abomination to ruin the fun but let's enjoy utopia while it lasts
If now my dorm and my work place (a scientific institution) would consider running ipv6 I'll be overjoyed.
As now apparent, i underestimated the numbers for the Blocks given back by entities from the early days of the internet wenn /8's were given out to universities and big businesses. Still Ripe and Arin are down to their last block in a few days and then it will soon start to get interesting:
ReplyDeletehttp://ipv6.he.net/statistics/
Deployment rates for v6 are still abysmal, don't know what people are thinking.