The IPv4 Depletion site

March has been a busy month in terms of Ipv4 allocations, we are slowly but steadily getting close to the one year mark of the time left before the IANA pool is depleted.
The Brazilian National Internet Registrar allocated 2 Million addresses from the 186 block. This was no surprise as the last allocation from Brazil NIR was made in September 14 of last year.
China Telecom allocated several blocks for two different provinces, all allocations came from APNIC’s 182 block. The Sichuan province network got about 1,5 Million addresses from two separate allocations. The Jiangxi province network got about 1,25 Million addresses from another two separate allocations.
China Unicom allocated a total of 1,25 Million addresses to the Henan and Guangxi provinces.
Finally, Akamai Technologies in the US allocated about 250,000 addresses. It is very unusual that anybody other than telecom providers allocates such large address spaces.

Recently, IANA delegated the 50/8 and 107/8 to ARIN. This brings down the total pool of free /8 at the IANA level to 17 x /8 or a total of 285 million free addresses.

The total pool of free addresses continues to drop. Recently it dropped below 700 million addresses.

APNIC announced that Korea Telecom allocated about 4 million addresses from the 175 network today. The network addresses are in the range 175.192.0.0 – 175.255.255.255 and is the largest allocation made so far this year. Korea Telecom is a “big spender” of IPv4 addresses, last year they allocated about 5 million addresses in total.

APNIC finally allocates 2 new /8 from IANA. I originally anticipated that this allocation would be done in 2009. Less than 10% of the IP-address space is now unallocated.

The interesting thing here is that 1.0.0.0/8 is now a legal routable IP-network. This might cause some serious problems and disruptions. The issue is that this network is already “widely used” as Leo Vegoda pointed out in the Internet Protocol Journal as early as 2007

A quick google confirms his worries:
Fonality uses 1.0.30.1/24 for their PBX system.

Data Return (now Terremark) is rumored to use 1.4.0.0/16 for their internal network.

1.1.1.1 might seem to be a cool address. Not so cool anymore when you realize that anybody behind a Cisco Wireless LAN Controller might have a problem accessing you. The Cisco Wireless LAN Controller is using 1.1.1.1 as the default address

University of Hamburg and University of Manitoba seems to be using 1.1.1.1 as their default login page.

More issues can be found here.

Over the last few days Comcast have been granted extensions to some of their existing networks. The new Comcast allocations sums up to 2,752,512 addresses. The pool of free addresses that ARIN administers are now very low.

Wireless broadband seems to be more and more popular and require more and more addresses. Hutchison 3G Austria recently allocated around a quarter of a million Ipv4 addresses and Vodafone in Germany allocated 1 million addresses.

The RIR have granted allocations of a total of 4,118,266 addresses so far this year. Some of the bigger allocations are presented below:

China Unicom allocated about 1,3 million addresses (175.148.0.0/14 and 175.160.0.0/12) to the Liaoning province network. China Unicom is one of the biggest “spender” of IPv4 addresses. Last year they allocated over 6 million addresses.

Telekom Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur allocated over 500,000 addresses in the range from 175.136.0.0 to175.143.255.255. The network name in the whois database indicates that they intend to use this network for ADSL customers.

KDDI Corporation in Tokyo, Japan allocated over 500,000 addresses yesterday.

North-West Telecom, located in St Petersburg, Russia allocated over 500,000 addresses a few days ago. Russia has a surprisingly low allocation rate. Last time any entity in Russia got any significant amount of addresses allocated was in Feb of 2009. That time, OJSC Uralsvyazinform allocated 250,000 addresses for their ADSL network.

So far, only 8 allocations have been made from IANA to the RIRs in 2009. Will there be more allocations before the end of the year? I believe so.

Right now, the pool of free addresses at the RIR level is at a record level low of about 17 blocks. The RIR pool has not been this low since in year 2000.

Both ARIN and APNIC are especially low on free addresses. I already expect APNIC to have requested new blocks from IANA. ARIN is very close to request new blocks too. Last time ARIN allocated new blocks from IANA was in December last year. I expect both ARIN and APNIC to request new space before the end of the year.

If my estimates are correct we will see a total of 12 allocations from IANA this year (APNIC 6, RIPE 4, ARIN 2, LACNIC 0, AfriNIC 0). A pace of 1 block a month is in line with what we have been seeing the last few years. We will have 17 free blocks remaining going in to 2010, if my estimates are correct about those two allocations. A very basic linear estimate on the depletion data would suggest that 17 blocks could last for about 17 months. That would be May 2011…

Are you IPv6 ready yet?

Today, North Star Information Hi.tech Ltd. Co in Bejing China allocated 3 million addresses ranging from 175.48.0.0 to 175.95.255.255. This is the third allocation that North Start made this year. Previous allocations this year includes 500,000 addresses allocated in March and 2,000,000 in May.

It is really hard to find any additional information about North Star China. After a few google searches I found one company in Bejing with a similar name. “Beijing North Star”. However, their address is different from the company that made the allocations. Furthermore, they are in the real estate business and have only 6000 employees according to their latest financial report.

The contact persons in the whois lookup have gmail addresses. I find this a little bit odd, especially for a company that have allocated nearly 6 million addresses in 2009.

Please contact me if you have any information about North Start Information Hi. Tech Ltd. Co in Beijing. I would like to make sure that the remaining IPv4 addresses are used in a non wasteful and fair way.

Check out the new IPv4 depletion map. The map position all allocations over 250,000 made this year up until 2009-11-09. Click on the place mark to see details about allocation size, company name, city, country, first IPv4 address in block and date.

The IPv4 depletion map

APNIC has handed out some large blocks lately to China and South Korea:
1. The network 183.192.0.0/10 of about 4 million addresses got allocated to a yet unknown entity in China. APNIC’s whois database is not yet updated to reflect this new allocation.
2. China Telecom Zhejiang province network allocated a /11 or about 2 million addresses.
3. Korea Telecom allocated a /11 or about 2 million addresses.
Those recent allocations along with the slow pace of allocations in Europe have changed how the end game most likely will look like. APNIC will most likely be the last RIR to request space from IANA. This last request will be for the last remaining odd block. I previously projected that RIPE would get the odd block. The remaining 21 x /8 that IANA got are now projected to be handed out like this: ARIN and RIPE gets 4 each, LACNIC gets 2 and APNIC gets 11.