[Infowarrior] - The year in IPv4 addresses: almost 200 million served

[Richard Forno]

The year in IPv4 addresses: almost 200 million served

By Iljitsch van Beijnum | Published: January 02, 2009 - 12:31PM CT

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20090102-the-year-in-ipv4-addresses-almost-200-million-served.html

One of the first things I do every year on the first of January is  
have a look at what happened with the IP address stockpile during the  
previous year. We started 2008 with 1,122.85 million unused addresses  
left and we ended it with 925.58 million. So the world used up 197.27  
million IPv4 addresses in 2008, increasing use of the total address  
space from 69.7 percent a year ago to 75.3 percent now.

The IP address space is managed by the Internet Assigned Numbers  
Authority (IANA), which is part of ICANN, the people who normally  
debate the virtues of .xxx domains. IANA maintains a list of 256  
blocks of 16,777,216 IPv4 addresses each, identified by the first 8- 
bit number in an IP address. Each of those "/8" blocks is either  
delegated to a Regional Internet Registry (RIR), is unallocated  
(available for future delegation), has legacy status, or is reserved  
for a special use.

The table below shows the overall distribution of IPv4 addresses among  
the regional registrars.


Delegated to/status 	Blocks 	+/- 2008 	Addresses (millions) 	Used  
(millions) 	Available (millions)
AfriNIC 	2 	  	33.55 	9.18 	24.37
APNIC 	30 	+4 	503.32 	454.36 	48.96
ARIN 	31 	+4 	520.09 	446.06 	74.03
LACNIC 	6 	  	100.66 	68.88 	31.78
RIPE NCC 	26 	  	436.21 	423.65 	12.56
LEGACY 	92 	+1 	1543.50 	1363.29 	180.21
UNALLOCATED 	34 	-9 	570.43 	  	570.43
Totals 	221 	  	3707.76 	2765.42 	942.34



APNIC (Asia-pacific region) and ARIN (North America) both got four  
new /8 blocks last year—ARIN got two of those just before Christmas.  
LACNIC (Latin America and Caribbean) and especially AfriNIC (Africa)  
still have a lot of address space to work with, but it looks like the  
RIPE NCC (Europe, Middle East, former USSR) will be receiving more  
address space from IANA soon.

The block that was added to the legacy pile is 7.0.0.0/8, which was  
given out to the US DoD Network Information Center, which apparently  
didn't want this information to appear in the IANA list, but it's now  
listed as "administered by ARIN." (See my full report for additional  
caveats.)

Things get more interesting when we look at the top 15 list of largest  
IP address-using countries. The US is still at the top, having 52.4  
percent of all IPv4 addresses in use—which includes the vast majority  
of the legacy space. However, a few years ago this was at 60 percent,  
so 52 is actually an improvement.

Despite that, the US was still the largest user of new IPv4 addresses  
in 2008 with 50.08 million addresses used. China was a close second  
with 46.5 million new addresses last year, an increase of 34 percent.


Rank 	Was 	2009-01-01 (millions) 	2008-01-01 (millions) 	Increase 	 
Country
1 	  	1458.21 	1408.15 	4% 	United States
2 	3 	181.80 	135.31 	34% 	China
3 	2 	151.56 	141.47 	7% 	Japan
4 	  	120.29 	120.35 	0% 	Europe general
5 	  	86.31 	83.50 	3% 	United Kingdom
6 	7 	81.75 	72.46 	13% 	Germany
7 	6 	74.49 	73.20 	2% 	Canada
8 	  	68.04 	67.79 	0% 	France
9 	  	66.82 	58.86 	14% 	Korea
10 	  	36.26 	33.43 	8% 	Australia
11 	12 	29.75 	23.46 	27% 	Brazil
12 	11 	29.64 	24.04 	23% 	Italy
13 	16 	24.01 	19.83 	21% 	Taiwan
14 	18 	23.18 	17.01 	36% 	Russia
15 	14 	21.67 	20.42 	6% 	Spain

Although China and Brazil saw huge increases in their address use,  
suggesting that the developing world is demanding a bigger part of the  
pie while IPv4 addresses last, what's really going on is more complex.  
India is still stuck in 18th place between the Netherlands and Sweden  
at 18.06 million addresses—only a tenth of what China has. And Canada,  
the UK, and France saw little or no increase in their numbers of  
addresses, while similar countries like Germany, Korea, and Italy saw  
double-digit percentage increases.

A possible explanation could be that the big player(s) in some  
countries are executing a "run on the bank" and trying to get IPv4  
addresses while the getting is good, while those in other countries  
are working on more NAT (Network Address Translation) and other  
address conservation techniques in anticipation of the depletion of  
the IPv4 address reserves a few years from now.

In both cases, adding some IPv6 to the mix would be helpful. Even  
though last year the number of IPv6 addresses given out increased by  
almost a factor eight over 2007, the total amount of IPv6 address  
space in use is just 0.027 percent.