A short report today, but amongst other smaller allocations yesterday, 256K addresses were allocated to Tele2 Sverige AB in Sweden, which brings us down another 0.03 /8s or so. If the allocation rates continue at that pace we might well be out by the beginning of next week …
Tag Archives: IPv6
This week in the IPv4 world
It’s been an interesting week in the world of IPv4. Still plenty of people trying to tell you that there’s no problem and no-one’s running out, but a couple of significant things have happened this week which are worth noting.
Firstly, RIPE NCC, the regional Internet registry for Europe made an official announcement last Tuesday (4 September) that they were down to their last /10 above the final /8, which is 0.25 of a /8 or 4,194,304 addresses. When this happens, RIPE move to ‘Phase 1’, which means that their allocation people work in pairs and scrutinise things much more closely. In addition, things are processed very strictly in order and they will only communicate with you when your ticket is in the front of the queue. RIPE have also made their official graph update daily now, which you can find at http://www.ripe.net/internet-coordination/ipv4-exhaustion/ipv4-available-pool-graph
The second thing to happen this week has come from a rather unusual place – Iran. Two different ISPs (who may or may not be government owned/controlled, I don’t know), asked for two blocks of addresses, one a /12 and another a /13 – a total of 1,572,864 in just one week. The sensation caused the “Huston-o-Meter” (at http://ipv4.potaroo.net) to jump from 4 October to 27 September and now stands, at the time of writing, at 22 September. If any more large allocations occur between now and then, we could be looking at a run-out date of less than 2 weeks time!
Good time to keep your head in the sand, isn’t it?
One month to go?
So as I write, today is 29 June 2012. As of yesterday, 29 July 2012 was Geoff Huston’s prediction for RIPE to get down to the final /8 (although I notice it’s now at 28 July), at which point the supply of IPv4 addresses to Europe and the surrounding region effectively dry up, along with the APNIC region which “exhausted” last year.
The “head-in-sand” mentality still appears to be quite prevalent still, and I’m not sure that’s going to change until the day actually happens. Here’s hoping it’ll come soon …
World IPv6 Launch
So today, Wednesday 6 June 2012, one year on from the previous World IPv6 Day which was held on Wednesday 8 June 2011, is officially World IPv6 Launch Day. Major web sites such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others including Akamai, the content distribution network, have permanently switched on their IPv6 support today and, unlike last year, aren’t turning it off this time. I’ve no idea whether this will have any effect in driving IPv6 adoption, but we can only hope I suppose.
What was more worrying, but probably not surprising, was the large number of inaccurate press reports on the subject. The BBC News web site seemed to be telling us that IPv6 had only just been invented and switched on, when in fact it’s been around since 1997 in one form or another. Then there was the usual ‘who needs IPv6, just ignore it’ articles and lots more besides. It really doesn’t help when the press get it wrong like this!
My biggest disappointment of today was that, although Google had trumpeted how IPv6 compliant it was now, I thought I’d go for the obvious test and send an e-mail from Gmail to my own email address, which sits on an IPv6-enabled server. And guess what – although you can access Gmail’s web interface over v6, you can’t actually send the mail using v6 – looking at the headers, I was disappointed to see that the mail was delivered to my server over IPv4. That said, Google Talk (XMPP) is available over IPv6, so that’s good at least.
So, happy World IPv6 Launch day, and the next milestone is going to be RIPE running out of addresses, if the predictions are correct, in about two months’ time.
World IPv6 Launch – and this time they’re not switching it off
Last year, World IPv6 Day was held on 8 June, where lots of well-known (and some not-so-well-known) Internet sites turned on IPv6 for a day to see what would happen. Well, the Internet Society have come up with a sequel, called “World IPv6 Launch” – to be held on 6 June this year – and this time the plan is not to switch the IPv6 off.
Major companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and the Bing division of Microsoft are taking part, which is probably a large proportion of the IPv4 traffic currently going and up down the Internet today, so it will be interesting to see what effect turning on IPv6 will have. Although it must be said that most ISPs in the UK have been very slow to roll out IPv6, some have and this will at last mean that we get to talk to all these big sites over the new protocol at last.
I’ve never really made a big secret of the fact that I think the UK ISPs really need to get a move-on with the v6 rollout – at the time of writing, the predictions are that RIPE will run out of IPv4 addresses around the end of July, so time is now of the essence. What are you all waiting for?! (I suspect the answer is “someone else to do it first”)
More details at http://www.worldipv6launch.org/
World IPv6 Day – what now?
Hopefully most people will have realised by now that last Wednesday (8 June) was World IPv6 Day. The idea of this day was to enable IPv6 on various web sites, including some quite famous ones like Google and Facebook and Yahoo! and see what would happen.
Irritatingly, there were many press articles about World IPv6 Day were published which seemed to me to be still largely sceptical of the whole thing, or was dismissed as a pointless exercise. But really, the whole point of the day itself was basically to see what would happen when people enabled IPv6 on their servers. Perhaps The Register put it the best with their headline, even if the article itself wasn’t much good in my opinion —”World IPv6 Day fails to kill Internet”, as if that was some kind of surprise. (I knew it wouldn’t, but then again this web site has been IPv6 enabled for ages…)
But even if the press think or thought it was all one great big massive publicity stunt, what now? Because now, the day is over, and presumably we can all go back to sleep — but sadly we can’t, because IPv4 addresses are still running out. We can’t use NAT, or double NAT, or treble NAT forever. And it left me thinking about what should happen next, because the world after World IPv6 Day doesn’t seem much different to the world before World IPv6 Day. Maybe we should have another one next year…?
Thankfully, things do seem to be moving, but slowly. Two big UK ISPs have announced on their respective web sites that they either have plans to roll out v6 or are trialling it – O2/Be are hopefully going to have v6 available at the end of the year, and Plusnet are currently trialling now. And Billion now have a UK version of an IPv6 ADSL wireless router (albeit with beta firmware) also shipping.
I’m hoping that when O2/Be roll out their v6 implementation, being one of the larger UK ISPs, that this would entice the likes of BT Retail and TalkTalk to follow suit. Plusnet, although owned by BT, is not really big enough to be called a ‘big player’ in the market. It’s the old problem – the ISPs are claiming there’s no demand, and the service providers can’t roll it out because the ISPs aren’t offering it, which means they can’t create demand. Perhaps things won’t change until the companies that got the last APNIC allocations use their allocations up 9 months hence.
It’s all slightly depressing, isn’t it? :)
Review: IPv4 “Significant Announcement” ceremony and press conference
So now we know what blocks of IPv4 look like. They’re glass! Today was the live webcast of the Numbering Resource Organisation‘s “Significant Announcement” ceremony from some hotel in Florida, USA. Each of the Regional Internet Registries were awarded a commemorative glass block and some kind of large white certificate as they were each given their final /8 allocation of 16,777,216 IPv4 addresses. Each award was followed by a speech, the quality of which (in my opinion at least) fared from ‘appalling’ to ‘not that good’. This was followed by a press conference in which I understand the questions were not that great, and in some cases answered inaccurately. So I’m expecting a whole raft of wrong news articles tomorrow.
Now we can say they are all gone. They truly are. You can check the official list – they really are all allocated! Goodbye and thanks for all the fish…
Update: The actual ceremony and press conference are on YouTube now – announcement and press conference.
IPv4 Exhaustion: Could tomorrow be the big day?
The Internet has been buzzing over the past few days about what the exact date will be for IANA to ‘push the button’ and finally exhaust their stock of /8s by allocating two blocks to APNIC. The rumours have been for quite some time that 31st Jan/1st Feb was going to be the big day, but now big big (and not very subtle) hints from several people who should know have been dropped, and also neatly coincides with NANOG 51, the perennial meeting of the North American Network Operators Group, and is also the day before Chinese New Year’s Eve.
So, watch this space! NANOG 51 starts today, with the main events tomorrow, Tuesday and Wednesday. I’m expecting an announcement around 09:30 EST (so 14:30 UK time, and around 00:30 in APNIC’s office in Brisbane) tomorrow.
Anyone for a party? :)
Clueless IPv6 Comment of the Day
Had to laugh (or possibly cry) at the following quote from reporter Claire Connelly of news.com.au, at http://www.news.com.au/technology/the-internet-has-run-out-of-ip-addresses-and-what-happens-after-that-is-anyones-guess/story-e6frfro0-1225995086627 today:
“Web developers have tried to compensate for this problem by creating IPv6 – a system which recognises six-digit IP addresses.”
The rest of it is so full of errors, I won’t even begin to start pointing them out – but it made me laugh anyway. If this is the quality of reporting we’re going to get next week when the addresses *do* run out, I think we’re in for a bit of fun…
(In case you weren’t aware, IPv6 addresses aren’t six digits in length – they are 128-bit numbers, which is technically 32 hex digits in length, if all of the leading zeros are present.)
IPv4 Exhaustion News: Another bumper day at APNIC
At APNIC, it seems to have been another fantastic day of handing out loads of IPv4 addresses to the Chinese – today a /10 (or about 4 million addresses) was allocated to China Mobile bringing the total APNIC address pool down to 1.4 /8s, from 1.66 /8s at the weekend, a whopping 0.26 /8s decrease in one day.
There is still rampant speculation on when ‘IANA IPv4 exhaustion day’ will be, since apparently it’s meant to be a secret – but my guess is still on 00:00 UTC+10 Tuesday 1 Feb (which is about 14:00 UK time Monday 31 Jan). Can’t come soon enough for me…