ARIN announced today that they are down to their last /8 (roughly 1.6 million) of IPv4 addresses. Here’s what you need to know and do:
It’s telling that two of the IPv4 blocks ARIN allocated immediately prior to their announcement went to two large service providers: reportedly, Comcast and Akamai. After all, it’s service providers that require a supply of addresses to continue to grow and be profitable.
Many enterprise networks have delayed or avoided planning for IPv6 adoption, perhaps surmising that the relatively slow rate (so far) of IPv6 uptake makes such delay or avoidance reasonable.
But IPv4 exhaustion in North America follows exhaustion that has already happened in Europe and Asia Pacific. In those regions, new Internet subscribers, whether mobile or otherwise, have come online via IPv6. The same trend is now imminent in North America.
Enterprise managers need to realize that new Internet subscribers will be requesting business websites and content from IPv6 enabled hosts. If those websites and that content are not available over IPv6, while competitors websites are, user experience and brand may suffer.
Getting your website and content online is a very manageable project for almost all enterprises. You’ll need IPv6 addresses (and a plan prior to determine what size allocation). You’ll also need an ISP that supports IPv6.
Contact your ISP today and ask them the status of their IPv6 support.
Next, visit the Infoblox IPv6 Center of Excellence page for address planning and IPv6 adoption resources, including white papers, webinars, and videos.
We’ll be following up with more information and resources here on the blog and on the CoE website so be sure to check in often.
@ipv6tom
Update: From the ARIN website, if you’ve got a new or pending request for IPv4 space with ARIN, here’s what you need to know:
- All IPv4 requests will be processed on a “First in, First out” basis, and all requests of any size will be subject to team review, and requests for /15 or larger will require department director approval.
- ARIN’s resource analysts will respond to tickets as they appear chronologically in the queue. Each ticket response is treated as an individual transaction, so the completion time of a single request may vary based on customer response times and the number of requests waiting in the queue.
- Because each correspondence will be processed in sequence, it is possible that response times may exceed our usual two-day turnaround.
- The hold period for returned, reclaimed, and revoked blocks is now reduced to 60 days.
- All returned, revoked, and reclaimed IPv4 address space will go back into the available pool when the 60 day period has expired.
- Staff will continue to check routing/filtering on space being reissued and will notify recipients if there are issues.
- When a request is approved, the recipient will have 60 days to complete payment and/or an RSA. On the 61st day, the address space will be released back to the available pool if payment and RSA are not completed.
- ARIN may experience situations where it can no longer fulfill qualifying IPv4 requests due to a lack of inventory of the desired block size. At that time, the requester may opt to accept the largest available block size or they may ask to be placed on the Waiting List for Unmet Requests.
- Full details about this process are available at: https://www.arin.net/resources/request/waiting_list.html
- ARIN contact information: hostmaster@arin.net, Help Desk +1.703.227.0660
