Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) On IPv6 Adoption And IPv4 ...

A qualified ‘yes’ to this.As of October 2018, all the RIRs are assigning addresses from their last /8 block. An up-to-date report on IPv4 address assignment can be found here.To put IPv4 address exhaustion into perspective, there are an estimated 11 billion devices connected to the Internet (Gartner), and this number is estimated to increase to 20 billion by 2020. There are also estimated to be 3.2 billion Internet users in the world (ITU), but the global population is 7.2 billion, so it is clear there are insufficient public IPv4 addresses to service future requirements. It is currently expected that the public IPv4 address pool will be entirely depleted by 2021.There is a substantial amount of IPv4 address space (so-called legacy addresses) that was previously assigned to organisations and never used, or were assigned for experimental purposes and are no longer required. Some of this has been returned or recovered by IANA who in turn re-allocates it to the RIRs, whilst Local Internet Registries (LIRs) are also able to trade IPv4 address blocks that exceed requirements to other LIRs, therefore encouraging more efficient usage. The typical cost of a /24 block of 255 addresses is currently in the order of USD $12-14 per address (IPv4 Market Group).Another widely used technique to facilitate connectivity is Network Address Translation (NAT), which uses specifically allocated IPv4 blocks (typically 10.x.x.x or 192.168.x.x) that are reserved for private networks. This allows nodes to use private IPv4 addresses in the internal network, while sharing a single public IPv4 address when communicating with the public Internet. However, NAT requires IP packets to be rewritten by a router, which can impose a performance penalty and cause problems with certain higher level protocols that employ IPv4 address literals (as opposed to domain names) in the application protocol. Some large ISPs that are running Carrier-Grade NAT (CGN) are also finding that even the 16.7 million addresses available in the largest private IPv4 block are insufficient to service their customers, and are therefore having to run multiple layers of CGN which causes substantial performance and network management issues.In the European (served by RIPE NCC) and North American (served by ARIN) regions, IPv4 addresses are no longer freely available and there is a wait list (https://www.arin.net/resources/request/waiting_list.html) for recovered addresses. The Asia-Pacific (APNIC) and Latin America and the Caribbean (LACNIC) regions have implemented strict rationing measures to conserve availability whereby new LIRs are only eligible for a /22 block of 1,024 addresses, with only the African (AfriNIC) region not considered to have depleted their address pool.The Internet Society, ICANN, and the RIRs encourage network operators to adopt IPv6, which enables 340 trillion trillion trillion IP addresses to be used. That’s enough for millions of addresses to be assigned to every person on Earth for hundreds of years, and solves the problem of an insufficient number of IPv4 addresses to meet the needs of a growing Internet.