Free Pool of IPv4 Address Space Depleted
February 3rd, 2011Via: Number Resource Organization Press Release:
The Number Resource Organization (NRO) announced today that the free pool of available IPv4 addresses is now fully depleted. On Monday, January 31, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated two blocks of IPv4 address space to APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for the Asia Pacific region, which triggered a global policy to allocate the remaining IANA pool equally between the five RIRs. Today IANA allocated those blocks. This means that there are no longer any IPv4 addresses available for allocation from the IANA to the five RIRs.
IANA assigns IPv4 addresses to the RIRs in blocks that equate to 1/256th of the entire IPv4 address space. Each block is referred to as a “/8” or “slash-8.” A global policy agreed on by all five RIR communities and ratified in 2009 by ICANN, the international body responsible for the IANA function, dictated that when the IANA IPv4 free pool reached five remaining /8 blocks, these blocks were to be simultaneously and equally distributed to the five RIRs.
“This is an historic day in the history of the Internet, and one we have been anticipating for quite some time,” states Raúl Echeberría, Chairman of the Number Resource Organization (NRO), the official representative of the five RIRs. “The future of the Internet is in IPv6. All Internet stakeholders must now take definitive action to deploy IPv6.”
“This is truly a major turning point in the on-going development of the Internet,” said Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s President and Chief Executive Officer. “Nobody was caught off guard by this; the Internet technical community has been planning for IPv4 depletion for quite 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.”
More: Moving to IPv6
You mean the intarweb done run out of tubes?