ARIN IPv4 Run out

On June 6, 2015, ARIN announced on Twitter that it is very likely that it is working on an IPv4 request it won’t be able to fill.  This means that ARIN IPv4 run out is here.

All North American entities will now turn to the IPV4 Transfer Market to fulfill their IPv4 needs.  While IPv4 transfers will be new for many ARIN region companies, they are certainly a tried and true practice.

Between February, 2014 and May, 2015, there were more than 17 million IPv4 addresses, or more than a /8, transferred, using ARIN’s 8.3 transfer process, between ARIN entities.  ARIN Transfer Data is published at https://www.arin.net/knowledge/statistics/transfers.html.  In analyzing this data, there have been almost 29.3 million IPv4 addresses transferred in total, with a steady increase in growth over time, as illustrated in the chart below.

Large block transfers to the likes of Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Windstream have accounted for 23 million of the 29 million IPv4 addresses transferred within ARIN.  Thus only 6 million of the IPv4 addresses transferred are smaller (/15 and smaller).

There have been some changes in block size trending between the first few years of transfers (2009-2013) and the past year (2014 to May, 2015).  Notably, /16’s were initially 17.4% of the transfers, but are now only 9%.  The growth area has been the /22 size which has grown from 5.3% to 21.2%.

The most common block size transferred is now, in fact the /22,  versus the /24 (at 24% and the /16 (at 17%) in 2009-13.

Another fact is the explosion in the number of transferred IPv4 addresses in 2015, with over 11 Million IPv4 addresses transferred.  The IPv4 Transfer Market is now well established in ARIN Region.