IANA IPv4 Endgame Arrives

To borrow terminology, the IPv4 middlegame has ended from the perspective of the IANA. Officially, APNIC received two /8s on January 31 (or February 1, depending where you are. I’m in North America so January 31 it is). That leaves the IANA free pool at five /8s which are already spoken for as the result of a coordinated global policy which allocates one /8 to each RIR when the free pool reaches the number of RIRs, which happens to be five. We will very likely see the announcement of the allocation of the final five /8s very soon. That puts IANA into the endgame scenario for IPv4. No matter how much need or justification or other metric there is for a new allocation, there is nothing left to allocate.

The middlegame has not yet passed for the RIRs, however. They will continue allocating IPv4 addresses per their local policies until their own free pools is depleted according to whatever metric has been defined by their own policy processes. When each one reaches endgame will depend on demand and local policies in its respective region. What seems certain is that at least one RIR will reach endgame during 2011 and it is likely that most will.

What does this endgame scenario mean, though. Well, it means there is no longer a business case for delaying deployment of IPv6. If you run an Internet hosting or provision business and you have access to IPv6 service, you should be asking yourself why you have not already enabled IPv6 on your network. If you are in the same pickle that my day job is in, where none of your network providers is supporting IPv6, have you been hounding them to support it? Will you be ready to enable IPv6 when it is available from at least one of your providers?

In the near term, there is likely to be much pain for Internet providers, possibly more for eyeball networks than for hosting networks, but there will be pain on all fronts.  In the medium term, or, optimistically, in the late near term, IPv6 will make a substantial penetration on the Internet and IPv4 will start waning in relevance. Alas, there is no reason to be optimistic. Long term, IPv4 will either reach a steady state in the background, or will actually start being abandoned in favour of IPv6 when it becomes clear that the cost of running multiple protocols is no longer justifiable from a business perspective. At that stage, addresses will likely start being returned to RIRs, and the IPv4 middlegame state will resume and likely continue in perpetuity thereafter.

All I know for certain about the IPv4 endgame and the transition from IPv6 opening to middlegame is that at my day job it will take at most a week, or maybe two depending on other time pressure, to enable IPv6 across the network once our upstream providers (Hello? AS701 and AS852? You there?) get with the program.

If you’re one of the millions of poor schmucks who just use the Internet, expect it to become somewhat more fragile than you are used to in the near term and pray IPv6 transitions to middlegame quickly.