Want to read something startling to wake you up today? Here it is:

Projected IANA Unallocated Address Pool Exhaustion: 06-Sep-2011

Projected RIR Unallocated Address Pool Exhaustion: 29-Aug-2012

Or to put it another way – that’s only about 643 days from now….

Let me start at the beginning for a minute…the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is responsible for the global coordination of the Internet protocol resources and provides these resources to the Regional Internet Registry’s (RIR) who, in turn, delegates resources to their customers, which include ISP’s and end-user organizations.

Sure, there are a few other steps & details, but you can get the general idea that everything starts with IANA, and basically ends with RIR’s decisions on how to allocate the last remaining IP addresses. IANA’s IPv4 exhaustion has been predicted by scientists for decades so let’s just skip back to just the last six years….

In 2003, after the .com boom had already went “boom”, some various scientists predicted we had until about 2021 before we had anything to really worry about in our corporate or home based networks, which for them, would be long after these “scientist geniuses” were retired, or more likely dead (thanks mostly in part to PAT… [I mean thanks to PAT that we would still have IP addresses unallocated, not that the scientists are dead]).

However, a new study in the spring of 2008 shows that we have less than 10% of reserved unallocated addresses available and that we’re going to be lucky to even get to 2012 with our current IPv4 addresses in place, and we’ll start seeing address allocation problems occurring within the next year!

But what has created this massive address exodus from IANA in the last few years and how will it affect me?

First, I have to make some basic assumptions in this blog since I am not sure that anyone understands the exact question that I am trying to answer, because figuring out the IANA allocation amount and how fast it is being depleted is much like playing in the stock market. However, by assuming that 2010’s growth will be much like 2008 and 2009, we can just do the math based on the last year and a half.

This just seems like a good idea on where and how the prediction of when the unallocated IPv4 address will run out….or you can stop reading now and just keep believing what you are probably thinking…”That this is someone else’s problem” ….and you can just keep ignoring the problem, at least for another 643 days, give or take a few days.

But to answer the question about what is creating this problem in the first place, we have to understand what the world needs, and to quickly put things into perspective, the world needs IP addresses more than the U.S. needs oil. To be even more exact, at the end of 2003 the address consumption rate was about 64 million a year, and at the end of 2009 it is believed to be 192 million per year, which gives us about two more years before the IANA starts getting Social Security.

With all this in mind, understand that a new RIR policy was created in 2008 that tells the IANA “When you’ve just allocated the last of six /8 network blocks, give us the remaining five unallocated network blocks!”, which means the demise of the IANA forever. Wow, now there’s something to contemplate. It is very possible that IANA was both created and retired in your lifetime, and what a history it created!

Be sure and stop by next week and get up-to-the-minute updates on the depletion of the IPv4 unallocated address space. In the meantime, be sure and check out www.globalnettraining.com for some end of year specials and where you’ll find the best and only Todd Lammle Cisco Authorized training!

Cheers!
Todd Lammle