Howfunky.com: ARIN moves into Phase 4 and is down to their last /8 of IPv4

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

ARIN moves into Phase 4 and is down to their last /8 of IPv4 - it is time for IPv6

It is official, as of today (April 23, 2014) ARIN and by extension North America has run into the final phase of IPv4 address allocations. They are down to their last /8 and therefore the largest allocation now will be a /22 along with showing a use case for transition over to IPv6. If you have no transition plan, you can't even get that last /22.

You can see more information about Phase 4 at the ARIN press release. This is a huge deal for the Internet community and will likely change some corporate and enterprise adoption plans and thinking in the near future. If you are curious, it looks like Akamai was the big winner with the 104.64.0.0/10 allocation going to them and tipping the inventory level.

So for all of you holding off thinking IPv6 will never impact them, it is time to start planning and figuring out your design and implementation schedules. You will have a bit of time for the service providers to burn through their existing inventory of IPv4 but after that you will have to purchase IPv4 at the going market rate. It makes IPv6 look more and more attractive.

If you want some help getting started in a lab or deploying and you run Windows you might want to pick up my book.