Goodbye IPv4 Address Space?

Goodbye IPv4 Address Space?

So today marked an auspicious occasion in which the last 5 /8 IP addresses were handed to each of the Regional Registries (RIRs). This marks the last of the unoccupied ranges being handed out from the central registrar to regional managers of the .

APNIC in a prior meeting was assigned the previous two /8 ranges, leaving just the 5 /8 ranges allocated today. These were then distributed to ARIN, RIPE NCC, APNIC, LACNIC and AfriNIC, officially exhausting the IPv4 address pool.

Whilst there are no more IPv4 addresses to allocate to the RIRs, there are still a substantial number of IPv4 addresses ready to allocate within each RIR.

For example, all the RIRs except APNIC have at least 16777215 IP addresses to allocate, and APNIC has 50331645 addresses to allocate.

What is most likely to occur over the next few months is that the allocation policies of the RIRs will become more strict, in order to persuade people to move towards a full scale implementation of . But more of that later..

Reference: NRO: Free Pool of IPv4 Address Space Depleted

John Dixon

John Dixon is the Principal Consultant of thirteen-ten nanometre networks Ltd, based in Wiltshire, United Kingdom. He has a wide range of experience, (including, but not limited to) operating, designing and optimizing systems and networks for customers from global to domestic in scale. He has worked with many international brands to implement both data centres and wide-area networks across a range of industries. He is currently supporting a major SD-WAN vendor on the implementation of an environment supporting a major global fast-food chain.

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