It’s estimated that in July or August that every one of the 4+ billion IPv4 addresses in the world will be completely allocated, with the IPv4 resource pool completely depleted. This means businesses that rely on them for servers & communications won’t be immediately granted allocations, but instead being placed on a waiting list. At the current burn rate of 36,000 IPv4 addresses daily, the American Registry of Internet Numbers (ARIN) is estimated to run out of IP addresses in early August, based on research and estimates carried out by internet broker Millitzer Capital.
Today ARIN has just short of 2.5 million addresses, which sounds like a comfortable amount, but in reality can be short lived. In theory, if a large corporation requests a /10 subnet (4 million IPv4 addresses) they would be advised that ARIN is out of that subnet, instead offered an /11 allocation, which is 2 million IPv4 addresses. If the company accepts that, ARIN is left with under 1 million IPs, which will trigger depletion notices. This includes wait lists for larger allocations when ARIN simply cannot fulfill an order.
Richard Jimmerson, ARIN’s CIO, emphasized this point to Ars Technica stating, “In the coming weeks, for the first time in history, an organization will come in and request IPv4 address space and qualify, but we won’t have it in our inventory to fulfill the request.”
Jimmerson urges users to think IPv6 instead — and the word’s getting out. According to Google, about 5 percent of worldwide users are using the new protocol. The United States is second in the world with its IPv6 adaptation – currently at 15 percent, with Belgium leading the way at over 30 percent.
If you’re considering starting your company’s transition to IPv6, or even if you have a plan of action in place, consider one Host Virtual’s worldwide native dual-stack IPv4 and IPv6 data center locations. With IPv4 addresses in use for the majority of traffic for the time being in parallel to IPv6, Host Virtual’s in-house developed dual-stack infrastructure has you covered with both protocols in over twenty locations on 5 continents.