The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has just allocated regional registries RIPE and APNIC a /8 each this month. For the uninitiated a /8 represents 2 to the power of 24 IP addresses or 167,77,216.
A /8 is the largest block allocation that can be made by IANA and these two have had the effect of bringing forward the x-date, the date for IPv4 exhaustion, by 5 months or so to April 30th 2011.
These blocks are subdivided into smaller subnets for further allocation to ISPs/organisations with smaller requirements such as BT and Timico. Timico has a variety of block allocations ranging from /16 to /20′s.
If you want to know more about IP addressing allocations check out wikipedia. The times they are a changing.
Footnote – a day later the date seems to have bounced back to September – don’t know what happened there. Still not very far off though.
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and they are changing faster all the time…
Lots of fun details (including a countdown) here http://www.ipv6actnow.org/info/what-is-ipv4/
Just 12 months left till IPv4′s D-Day then, I expect a number of ISPs might be caught out if they’re not paying attention. I hope that doesn’t happen, there’s really no excuse for not being prepared.
Mark
I’m looking at organising an IPv6fest to coincide with the IPv4 exhaustion date. It’s one of the subjects I’ll be discussing at next week’s LINX meeting. Will keep you posted if you are interested.
Tref
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