ARIN and LACNIC are now running neck and neck for most depleted free pool. RIPE's interRIR transfer policy should be ready for primetime in August and LACNIC is again exploring whether it wants to join RIPE, ARIN and APNIC in the global transfer market.
The ARIN free pool declined by more than 25% in April, leaving about 3.5 million IPv4 numbers available for allocation or assignment. The largest ARIN allocations included two /14s and a /15. Only two large blocks remain – a /11 and a /12. For how long is the question. Approximately 500,000 IPv4 numbers changed hands in April due to 8.3 transfer requests. We expect prices to inch upward as ARIN nears full depletion.
On April 9, RIPE NCC adopted a new policy that will permit inter-RIR transfers among ARIN, RIPE and APNIC. RIPE expects the policy to be fully implemented by August 2015. For more information on the policy see Avenue4’s April 10 blog. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s David Huberman proposed a new LACNIC policy that would permit inter-RIR transfers in and out of the LACNIC region. It is still in early stages of discussion but, if adopted, would have the effect of opening a truly global IPv4 market among all regions currently experiencing IPv4 free pool exhaustion. The last inter-RIR transfer policy proposed in LACNIC was abandoned in September 2014.
IPv6 connectivity reached a high of 6.46% on April 26 before falling back to 5.36% on April 29. Most of the big companies whose IPv6 deployment fell in March almost fully recovered from that loss in April; however, a handful of companies that we were tracking at one point - ChinaTel, CenturyLink and Teliasonera – are no longer listed in the World IPv6 Launch measurements as “Top 240” network operators in terms of IPv6 deployment.
In the news, the U.S. Inspector General issued a report on DOD’s poor progress on IPv6 deployment, Computerworld explores why IPv6 “is the road less travelled,” Network Computing addresses the complexity of rolling out IPv6, and Milton Mueller expresses concern that ICANN is crossing the line in an effort to retain ultimate control over all 3 Internet functions (names, protocols and numbers). Articles on these and other stories can be found on the Avenue4 resources page.
