ipv4 pool exhausted long before previously expected
Geoff Huston produces a report that quantifies the scarcity of IPv4 addressing resources. He has changed the prediction model to a polynormal system, which much more accurately maps onto historical resource demand patterns.
The result isn’t good news; the IANA pool of addresses free for allocation to RIRs is starting to look frighteningly scarce – boxing day 2009 will be the day that IANA’s stock is gone.
Though I think that ipv6 is a policy and political nightmare, I don’t think greenfield network deployments should be made without some thought to v6. Ensure all new purchases for networking gear (load balancers, firewalls, routers, managed switches) all support v6 addressing. Start to ask your upstream networks if they have a v6 transit product.
More importantly, think about conserving the life of v4. We have brought v4 from the point of extinction before with CIDR and NAT overload. I’m now part of an effort, working hard to understand whether the legacy class-E space can be reused for any unicast applications. It’s time to put pressure on the holders of legacy /8s to free them up and return them to IANA.
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January 31st, 2010 at 3:11 pm
Three years on and the situation is more clear – there have been changes to policy to slow down the rate of ipv4 assignment, and the economic bust has taken some of the pressure away. The view from 2010 is that the former model’s dates looked more specific with the end of next year being d-day.
http://www.andyd.net/2010/2010-will-be-a-bad-year-for-ipv4/