Since becoming the Internet Standard in July of 2017, IPv6 addresses have been the new norm (although one still not fully deployed even now, two years later) and IPv4 addresses have become more and more scarce. Slowly but undeniably the number and size of available IPV4 blocks have been edging their way toward depletion:
- 1998-Dec - IPv6 becomes Draft Standard for the IETF
- 2011-Jan-31 - NRO announces depletion of unassigned numbers
- 2011-Apr-19 - APNIC enters the last stage of its /8 exhaustion policy
- 2012-Sep-14 - RIPE reaches its last available /8 block
- 2012-Jun-06 - World IPv6 Launch
- 2014-Jun-10 - LACNIC enters IPv4 Exhaustion Stage 3
- 2015-Sep-24 - ARIN announces issuance of final IPv4 address
- 2017-Jan-16 - AFRINIC announces approach of IPv4 Exhaustion Stage 1
- 2017-Jul-14 - IPv6 ratified as an Internet Standard by the IETF
- 2019-Nov-25 - RIPE allocates the last of it’s available addresses
- 2019-2020 - AFRINIC is expected to reach exhaustion
Did you happen to notice the one in bold?
That’s right - Monday, November 25th, we were once again reminded that the end of the IPV4 era is near when RIPE officially announced the assignment of their last available /22 block of addresses. As if words were not enough to make the number “zero” apparent, RIPE also updated their interactive graph of available addresses to plainly show the absolute absence of available addresses:
Understandably, along with this announcement RIPE also repeated it’s “Call to Arms” for the adoption and continued development toward world-wide IPV6 compatibility.
Now, we would be negligent if we did not point out that there are waiting lists that allow for the request and provisioning of IPv4 addresses when they are released and recycled, but with practically none of the world's major ISPs reporting 100% IPv6 deployment these continued reminders make it difficult to ignore that there’s still a lot of work to be done before these announcements are no longer relevant.
If your business does need a service provider who still has available IPv4 addresses, please reach out to us by clicking the Submit a Request link here, or at the top of the page - we’ll be happy to help!
Image Accreditation:
- "No Vacancy" Photo by Samuel Holt on Unsplash
- RIPE NCC IPv4 Pool graph - https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/ipv4/ipv4-pool