Tag Archives: IPv4

ARIN Watch: 8 May 2014

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Yesterday was another pretty good day for IPv4 allocations at ARIN.  The large allocations made yesterday are as follows:

Microsoft Corporation – /13
Charter Communications – /17
FranTech Solutions – /18
Time Warner Cable Internet LLC – /18
Telspirion – /20
Metro Communications Company Inc – /21
Wisconsin CyberLynk Network Inc – /21
Foren Data Inc – /22
ISPrime Inc – /22
United Telephone Association Inc – /22
California Internet Solutions Inc – /22

In addition, there were two /24 blocks allocated.

(As an aside, I note that a block of /32 IPv6 was returned yesterday – that can’t be a common occurrence!)

Also of interest today is the news that there are now no longer any contiguous blocks of size /11 to /14 inclusive left, so any requests larger than a /15 will have to be dealt with either by splitting up the /9 or /10 or allocating them from a series of smaller blocks.

At the time of writing, ARIN’s counter is now showing 0.88 /8s left, which means just this week alone around 0.12 /8s have been allocated.  If we keep going like this ARIN is going to be out of IPv4 in weeks.

More days like this please!

ARIN Watch: 7 May 2014

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Around 0.08 /8s were allocated by ARIN yesterday (6 May 2014), and by the looks of it the allocations bigger than /24 were as follows:

AT&T – /12
Sonic.net Inc – /16
Pennsylvania State University – /15
Altima Telecom Inc (Canada) – /20
ColoMX LLC – /20
Net3 Inc – /20
A2 Hosting, Inc – /21
Core Technology Services Inc – /21
Midcast – /21
Valve Corporation – /21
VegasNAP LLC – /21
Capco Reference Data Services – /22
Airespring Inc – /22
Black Lotus Communications – /22
Rack Alley LLC – /22
Ronin Capital LLC – /23

Quite a bumper day really.   I think it’s unlikely AT&T are going to get any more before exhaustion now.  Can we have more days like this please ARIN?

ARIN reaches final /8

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In slightly unexpected news, ARIN reached their final /8 today supposedly because of the allocation of a /10 to Akamai, which reduced the space free from just over 1.25 /8s to 1 /8s exactly.  This means that ARIN are now in ‘Phase 4’, where all address allocation requests are closely scrutinised, and requests for /15 are above are closely scrutinised by a senior member of ARIN.

I haven’t seen the actual allocation figures yet, but this really should be the starting gun for Americans everywhere to start thinking about taking their heads out of the sand and rolling out IPv6.  It’s now going to be a lot harder to get allocations out of ARIN, and it can’t be long before total exhaustion is upon us.  Geoff Huston’s meter is probably going to be wound forward by months in the morning.

LACNIC crashes through the ‘final /8’ barrier in style

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LACNIC crashed through the ‘final /8’ barrier in style yesterday by allocating a smashing 2,368,512 IPv4 addresses in just one day (0.141 /8s).  This brings the total left to around 0.87 /8s as of today, and this really does signficantly reduce the time needed to reach exhaustion (which in LACNIC’s case will be when they reach the final /10, or 0.25 /8s).

Most of the addresses allocated yesterday went to Brazil, the biggest block of 1,048,576 (/12) addresses going to Tim Celular S.A. in Brazil.  Other notable blocks include 2 x 262,144 addresses (/14)  and 6 x 131,072 (/15) going also to Tim Celular at the same time.  All the others are blocks of 1,024 and 2,048 (/22 and /21) so are relatively insignificant.

All blocks apart from two were allocated to Brazil, apart from one /22 which went to Colombia and another /22 went to Costa Rica.

It won’t take many more allocations like this to bring exhaustion very very close now.  Are there any other ISPs or mobile phone companies need more addresses in the near future, I wonder?

IPv4 depletion at LACNIC

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As of today, LACNIC (the IP address registry for Latin America and the Caribbean) are down to 1.05 /8s remaining, which means that it is likely in the next day or two to have reached the final /8 that they have.  LACNIC have slightly different rules to some of the other registries – RIPE and APNIC, for example, considered their stock of IPv4 addresses to be exhausted when they reached the final /8 (16,777,216 addresses) , whereas ARIN are taking a different approach and are basically reserving hardly any, so it truly is a “race to the bottom” for that region although the requirements for obtaining a block when they reach the final /8 are much increased.  LACNIC consider their addresses to be exhausted when they reach 4,194,304 addresses (/10) left.

Yesterday there were 524,288 addresses (/13) allocated to Telemar Norte Leste S.A. in Brazil, and a further 393,216 addresses split as two blocks of 262,144 (/14) and 131,072 (/15) addresses to Telefonica de Argentina.  If this rate of allocation continues (i.e. 0.05 /8s per day), LACNIC will be out of addresses in 16 working days from now.  I suspect it won’t be depleted that quickly, but still a sobering thought, if you still have your head in the sand over IPv4 exhaustion and you’re located in the LACNIC region.

The End of Year IPv4 Report

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So, here we are at the end of 2013 and let’s see where we are.  So far, APNIC and RIPE have ‘run out’, and the next two registries likely to be depleted in the next year or two are ARIN and LACNIC.  Until recently, it was likely that ARIN would run out first, and then ARIN and LACNIC were pretty much neck-and-neck for a while, but in recent months the demand for IPv4 in the LACNIC region has been accelerating quite a lot, and we’re now at the point (as of today) that LACNIC are now depleting their resources quite a bit faster than ARIN are.  Geoff Huston has the figures as of this morning at 1.5 /8s for ARIN and 1.3317 /8s for LACNIC, a difference of approximately 6 weeks.  If LACNIC continue this rate of depletion I suspect they will be down to the final /10 (as ARIN and LACNIC have different rules to RIPE, who reserved a whole /8) a fair bit sooner than the beginning of 2015.  As to why LACNIC has shown such a spurt in recent weeks, that’s anyone’s guess, but the next few months could be very interesting if current trends continue.  Just as well Comcast in the US is well on the way to rolling out IPv6 to 100% of their customer base then!

Happy new year!

ARIN reaches Phase 3, with only two /8s left

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Today the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) reached the next milestone in its IPv4 exhaustion journey.  There are now only two /8s remaining left, and one of those is the “last /8” which both APNIC and RIPE are already down to.  By current estimations (and particularly Geoff Huston’s), we’re probably about a year away from reaching the final /8 at ARIN.  This, of course, depends on whether the current depletion rate is maintained (which is what happened in the RIPE region), or whether there is an APNIC-style “run on the bank” and panic sets in.  Either way, ARIN’s page on the subject is interesting, as it breaks down the number of contiguous blocks available between /8 and /24.  If any of the big ISPs want a really block, they’d better get in quick, since at the time of writing there’s only one /8 left, two /10s, one /11, two /12s, one /13 and three /14s.

Interesting times ahead, and it will be fascinating to see which way it goes.  Especially as ARIN does not appear to have adopted a “final /8” policy as APNIC and RIPE have done, so it really is a dog-eat-dog race to the finish, pretty much.

BT Retail quietly trials CGNAT on some of their customer connections

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According to this news story on ISPreview.co.uk, BT Retail are quietly trialling Carrier Grade NAT on some of their customer connections,  This is the first of the ‘Big 5’ that are known to be doing so, not long after the Plusnet (also owned by BT) trial took place.  To me, this suggests that we are now at the point where even the big ISPs no longer have the IPv4 addresses to allocate to customers, and the article suggests that up nine other customers will be sharing a single address, if you have been placed on this trial.

The worry here is that all of the Big 5 will just use this as an excuse to delay IPv6 adoption further, when what we really need is mass adoption of IPv6 folllowed by, if and only if necessary, CGNAT for all the “legacy” applications still left on the Internet.

BT’s official FAQ on the matter can be found here.

And now the fun begins…

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Today marks the firing of the starting gun in the next phase of IPv4 exhaustion.  To date, running NATs on the ISP side has generally been the preserve of the mobile operators, where running servers generally isn’t something you’d want or need to do over a mobile connection.  However, something new happened today – Plusnet, the Sheffield-based (and BT Group owned) ISP announced they are going to run a 3-week trial of CGNAT, or Carrier Grade NAT.

Some more info on that can be found here:

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2013/01/isp-plusnet-trials-controversial-ipv4-address-sharing-as-ipv6-alternative.html
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/5658-plusnet-in-trial-of-carrier-grade-nat-to-conserve-ipv4-addresses.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/15/ipv4_nat/

Now, the term “carrier grade” has, to date, normally meant something along the lines of big and impressive, and can generally handle thousands or millions of whatever it can do, and generally you’d expect a “carrier grade” product to be somehow better than a product which is “non-carrier grade”.  However, this is probably the one “carrier grade” product that generally makes things worse.  A bit of explanation here – “carrier grade” in this context means that it is suitable for a “carrier”, or telco, to use.  CGNAT is “carrier grade” in the sense that it can handle thousands and thousands of connections at once, and runs on slightly beefier hardware than your average home ADSL router, but the net effect of running CGNAT actually makes the experience worse than it would otherwise have been, since you are now removing the ability for that ISP’s users to do port forwarding through the ISP’s NAT which will almost certainly stop quite a lot of things working, for example anything that requires an incoming port (e.g. a server), or perhaps things like UPnP and even Skype.  This is probably going to cause quite a lot of compaints, depending on how much it breaks, and also means that users will be getting a consderably degraded Internet experience than they already are (since NAT is not exactly how IPv6 was intended to be used in the first place).

Plusnet had an IPv6 trial, which they stopped for some unexplained reason, and so far no word on when or if it will be resurrected.  Rolling out CGNAT and not also rolling out IPv6 seems very short-sighted to me, but more importantly the fact that they are even considering CGNAT at all suggests to me that there is one AS in the UK that could be running dangerously low on its allocated IPv4 addresses (with no prospect of obtaining any more from RIPE).

I shall be watching this space with interest…