ARIN sees 9,000,000+ IPv4 addresses change hands in the last month; /24s most traded
Transfer Activity
ARIN registered the transfer of over 9 million IPv4 numbers in November. By far, the top block size being transferred in the combined ARIN interRIR and intraRIR markets is the /24 (256 numbers). In the RIPE market, the number of transfers has skyrocketed past last year’s number, however, the total numbers transferred has not. Romania, the source of most transfers in the RIPE region, may finally be depleting its supply of available IPv4 numbers and therefore contributing to this overall drop in RIPE transfer volumes. According to the RIPE IPv4 Address Listing Service, demand for IPv4 numbers among RIPE’s members far exceeds supply. Whether the new RIPE policy permitting interRIR transfers will ease this high level of demand remains to be seen.
Pricing
There were no notable changes in pricing since last month with /16 and smaller blocks trading between $7.00 and $8.50 per number and larger blocks trading for less due to volume discounts. Buyers continue to look for a last minute good deal before their 2015 budget runs dry. At the same time, sellers are setting their sights on higher pricing for 2016.
IPv6 Deployment
IPv6 deployment is closing in on 10% during high peak times (typically weekends and holidays) according to Google’s IPv6 connectivity stats and will likely hit that number by 2016. And yet growth in in the number of top 1000 Alexa websites reachable over IPv6 has been unremarkable, hovering around 16-17% over the last several months. Although some of the larger US network operators have seen double digit growth in IPv6 deployment since the beginning of the year, others have deployment percentages below where they started in January 2015. Even more sobering, of the 19 countries with IPv6 connectivity exceeding 5% (again based on Google data), only 5 are outside of North America and Europe, and only 7 have IPv6 connectivity in the double digits. All of which only confirms what we already know about IPv6 deployment: It’s happening but there’s still a long way to go before IPv6 is ready to take over the Internet.
News
The news was fairly quiet this past month with several blogs covering the RIPE 71 meeting in Bucharest. Geoff Huston provided an interesting analysis of IPv6 performance, finding that latency is not so much an issue with IPv6, as connectivity. Although the percentage of failed IPv6 connections has improved over the last few years, it is still several times higher than the rate of IPv4 failed connections.
