Tag: IPv4

Or, with apologies to Rolf Harris, “Can you guess what it is yet?”…

The NRO are inviting us to a webcast of a “special announcement” tomorrow. I wonder what it could be?

Might it be the end of the IANA IPv4 free pool? Or could it be that a few more /8s have been found down the back of the sofa? The latter is very unlikely.

We’re probably looking at a ceremonial doling out of the remaining /8s to the various RIRs.

While it may look a bit profligate to fly a load of RIR folk to Miami, it’s probably a necessary media stunt, as implementers and vendors have been sodding around, sat on their hands, for long enough, to the point that many folks’ home broadband routers and systems won’t do IPv6 and therefore can’t support a dual-stacked (v4 and v6 enabled) environment.

(The Real) Geoff Huston has, as usual, produced an interesting graph:

So we should find APNIC moving to activate their “final /8 policy” first, the idea being it – assuming Cyclone Yasi doesn’t try and finish the job the Queensland floods started in Brisbane – will start to issue allocations from the final /8 in smaller blocks, and only one allocation can be made to each APNIC member LIR from the last /8 – to try and give some level of running out fairly.

Anyway, it will certainly be interesting to keep an eye on these graphs!

Fortunately (in some respects), the runout in the RIPE NCC region looks to still be about 12 months away. Still doesn’t give me the warm fuzzies.

Folk need to start using IPv6, and debugging what’s wrong with it to stand any chance of being ready.