IP Address News

Providing you with a single site about IP Addresses News and Usage

IP Address News - Providing you with a single site about IP Addresses News and Usage

RIPE Region hits the bottom of its IPv4 reserve pool

The RIPE NCC today announced that they have basically reached the end of their IPv4 reserve pool. When RIPE received its last /8 allocation from IANA they choose to allocate this block in /22 increments to new LIR’s (Local Internet Registries). They have now allocated the last /22 contigious block and are now in the process of allocating equivalently /22s made up of /23 and /24 blocks.

If you thought there was still time at RIPE to get in line as a new applicant to get a /22 unfortunately you likely have missed the boat. RIPE saw a increase in the number of LIR applications (basically a run on the bank as the pool emptied) and noted that due to the back log of applicants some current applicants will likely not receive a /22 but may get a /24 from the wait-list in the future.

https://www.ripe.net/publications/news/about-ripe-ncc-and-ripe/update-approaching-ipv4-run-out

RIRs sign new service level agreement with ICANN

On June 29th, 2016, the RIRs collectively signed the service level agreement (SLA) that has been negotiated with ICANN for the IANA services.  This SLA or contract was negotiated as part of the number community’s portion of the IANA transition away from a US government contact with ICANN.

The IETF defines the Internet protocols and parameters, and in doing so delegates a portion of the number resources (IPv4, IPV6 & ASNs) used in those protocols to the RIRs for management.

The final step in the transition, from the numbering community’s perspective,  is for the US government to allow the contact for the IANA services with ICANN to expire, sometime before Oct 1, 2017.  Once the transition is completed, the RIRs will have a contract as a group with ICANN to provide the top-level coordination of the IPv4, IPv6, and ASN IP number resources.

ICANN and Regional Internet Registries Sign SLA for the IANA Numbering Services

 

IPv4 address exports in Romania

Here at the the RIPE 71 meeting in Bucharest, Romania.  A very interesting presentation was given by one of the IP address brokers about the large scale export of IPv4 addresses from Romania.

According to data from RIPE and Cipiran Nica, 66% of all exported addresses in the RIPE region are from Romania. RO had 13.5M addresses before runout, then exported 5.2 M or more than 1/3 of the total addresses in the country. By contrast the next largest exporter in the region, Germany, was the source of 14% of the RIPE transfers.  This 14%, however, constituted less than 2% of total addresses registered in Germany.  

This export has always seemed a bit of an oddity since it was noted in earlier blog post from Dyn earlier in 2015. 

The presentation at the meeting revealed some of the on the ground details that are not easily explained by the statistics themsevles.  The primary reason so many of these addresses came on to the market was that a majority of the addresses in the country were being rented or were previously used for spam.  Prior to IPv4 exhaustion many RO companies rented addresses due to the cost of becoming a LIR. Additionally, there has been consolidation of the ISPs in the region and as these smaller ISPs were taken over the addreses were returned to the LIRs.  These are the addresses that went into the transfer market along with addresses that were obtained mostly for companies which were doing snowshoe spam. The addresses which were used for spam constituted 68% of exported addresses.  Approximately 30% of the addresses were from formerly rented addresses.

Estimates of actual IPv4 usage from the top 5 companies companies in Romania show that about 4.2M addresses are being used to conver 95% of the Internet access customers in the country.  

It will be interesting to see if this large scale export of IPv4 resources will have a negative effect on the longer term.  A number of the largest providers here are quite agressive in their IPv6 rollouts, but even those require IPv4 to be able to connect end users to the rest of the predominantly IPv4 Internet.

Romania’s Jump to the Number One exporter of IPv4 Addresses