ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers), the organization that manages IP address allocations for the North American region, has finally reached its IPv4 endgame. That is, it finally had a request it could not honour due to limited stock of IPv4 addresses. Historically, when such a situation was iminent, they would request additional IPv4 addresses from IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority). However, IANA’s free pool of IPv4 addresses was exhausted in 2011.
What this means is that organizations in North America can no longer obtain IPv4 addresses based solely on their justified need. ARIN does still have some small number of small IPv4 blocks available (/23s and /24s) which it can still issue. Those, however, are unlikely to last very long, and obtaining an allocation in that size range would not be substantially helpful for large organizations (usually ISPs or large hosting providers).
Now, to be fair, existing IPv4 infrastructure will continue operating unimpeded by the fact that new allocations are significantly limited or unavailable. The Internet as we know it is not going to fall over dead overnight. Unfortunately, this fact leads to an unhelpful mindset that is also at odds with reality. Many companies believe that because they have sufficient IPv4 addresses for their needs, they have no need to even consider IPv6. This neglects the fact that if you are operating only on IPv4, you cannot reach another site that is operating only on IPv6. Now, if the only external locations you need to reach on the Internet are IPv4 capable, that’s not a problem. But what happens when you encounter a remote site that you have to reach that is not IPv4 capable? What if your customers are not IPv4 capable for whatever reason? Then, it doesn’t matter how many IPv4 addresses you happen to have squirrelled away – you need IPv6.
It is supremely unfortunate that large network providers like Verizon (AS701) seem to subscribe to this mindset. When talking to one of their technical representatives in the weeks leading up to the recent ARIN news, I got a response that was exactly that attitude. It seems that because they 1) have sufficient IPv4 addresses for their needs, 2) nobody is asking for IPv6 (false – I asked), and 3) there is a cost to deploying IPv6 that cannot be justified at all (really?), there is no possible way the people I represented could have IPv6 service. It wasn’t even available if I offered to beta test the service!
I got an even more opaque response when I queried Shaw Communications on when they were planning to deploy IPv6 to their customers. I got a canned answer that translates to “we have no plans related to IPv6 at this time”. Of course, that may be partly due to the front line support staff having no idea, but still, at this stage in the game, it would be at least somewhat reassuring to know that they actually have a plan to deploy IPv6 at least. Unfortunately, it is far more likely that they will continue to have their heads in the sand and deploy CGNAT (Carrier Grade Network Address Translation) and completely ignore IPv6.
To be completely honest, I have to admit that I don’t believe IPv4 is going away any time soon. The IPv4 Internet will continue to operate for decades to come with increasing deployment of CGNAT and other technologies. This will happen regardless of whether IPv6 is deployed. However, I also strongly believe that IPv6 will be necessary sooner rather than later. NAT works mostly okay, with major caveats, for end users (“eyeballs”). However, it cannot work for content that those eyeballs want to access. Eventually, content providers will be unable to serve their content to IPv4 only eyeballs. And this neglects other services provided over the Internet such as email which have similar issues.
Here’s hoping the ARIN IPv4 exhaustion finally spurs the 800 pound gorillas in the North American market to take their collective heads out of their collective asses and deploy IPv6. I’m specifically calling out Verizon Business (AS701) and Shaw Communications (AS6327) because of my personal dealings but they are not the only offenders.