The last allocation of IPv4 addresses from the central pool to
Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) occurred Thursday in a symbolic
ceremony hosted by ICANN in Miami along with the Number Resources
Organization (NRO), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and the
Internet Society.
The allocation of the remaining five blocks of IPv4 addresses were allocated to the five RIRs.
The allocation of the final IPv4 addresses is analogous to the last
crates of a product leaving a manufacturing warehouse and going to the
regional stores or distributions centres, where they can still be
distributed to the public. Once they are gone, the supply is exhausted.
In this case, the RIRs will distribute the last IPv4 addresses to
Internet Service Providers, universities, governments,
telecommunications companies and other enterprises.
"It's only a matter of time before the RIRs and Internet Service
Providers (ISPs) must start denying requests for IPv4 address space,"
said Raúl Echeberría, Chairman of the Number Resource Organization, the
umbrella organization of the five RIRs. "Deploying IPv6 is now a
requirement, not an option."
"This is a major turning point in the on-going development of the
Internet," said Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's President and Chief Executive
Officer. "No one was caught off guard by this. The Internet technical
community has been planning for IPv4 depletion for some time. But it
means the adoption of IPv6 is now of paramount importance, since it will
allow the Internet to continue its amazing growth and foster the global
innovation we've all come to expect."
The new Internet protocol, IPv6, will open up a pool of Internet
addresses that is a billion-trillion times larger than the total pool of
IPv4 addresses (about 4.3 billion), which means the number of IPv6
addresses is virtually inexhaustible for the foreseeable future.
The move to IPv6 has been slower than hoped, with many organisations
such as internet service providers reluctant to adopt the new protocol
due to the cost.
"IPv6 addresses were designed as the solution to the predicted shortage
of IPv4 addresses, but as an industry, it has been easier to extend
usage of IPv4 rather than undergo the challenge of transitioning to
IPv6," Ovum's senior consultant Craig Skinner told ZDNet.
Technologies such as dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) and
network address translators (NATs), which allow for sharing of public IP
addresses within a pool of users, have helped in prolonging IPv4's
longevity, Skinner said.
Two "blocks" of the dwindling number of IPv4 addresses, about 33 million
of them, were allocated earlier this week to the Regional Internet
Registry (RIR) for the Asia Pacific region. When that happened, it meant
the pool of IPv4 addresses had been depleted to a point where a global
policy was triggered to immediately allocate the remaining small pool of
addresses equally among the five global Regional Internet Registries.
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