ICANN announced yesterday that it was in the process of allocating the remaining blocks of IPv4 to the five RIRs.
My first reaction to that was “What remaining blocks?” seeing as how there was much fanfare (well, of the limited Internet governance variety anyway) around the announcement back in 2011 when IANA handed out what they claimed were the last 5 /8s.
Turns out this is reclaimed space. The IANA IPv4 Recovered Address Space registry just went from 20 million to around 10 million. (Street value of those IPs? Around $136M USD!)
What triggered this distribution of IPv4? The announcement reports that it was LACNIC dropping to a /9 (that’s around 8 million to any civilians reading this) of available addresses.
It’s further explained here, if you want to explore some of the intricacies of Internet governance around IPv4 exhaustion.
Or, you could spend the time instead doing what any organization needs to do in response to these latest developments (*broken record alert*): Adopt IPv6.
“Redistributing increasingly small blocks of IPv4 address space is not a sustainable way to grow the Internet. IPv6 deployment is a requirement for any network that needs to survive.” says Leo Vegoda, ICANN’s Operational Excellence Manager.
Elise Gerich, IANA’s VP agrees: “To continue to fuel the economic growth and opportunity that is brought by the Internet, we are at the point where rapid adoption of IPv6 is a necessity to maintain that growth.”
You can just picture their pockets practically turned inside out and sending an unspoken message: “Quit bugging us about IPv4. Time to go put the bite on some other address protocol, preferably one with 96 more bits.”
Begin your IPv6 adoption today (if you haven’t already) by checking to see if your ISP support IPv6 (or when it plans to). Are you multi-homed (i.e., do you have more than one ISP)? You may want to begin the process of getting an IPv6 allocation from your RIR.
Need more info on IPv6 adoption? Go to http://www.infoblox.com/ipv6 for tons of IPv6 adoption resources.
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