The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the nonprofit association that manages the distribution of Internet number resources for its region, has issued the final IPv4 addresses in its free pool.
“The exhaustion of the free IPv4 pool was inevitable given the Internet’s exponential growth,” said John Curran, ARIN’s President and CEO. “Luckily, we prepared for this eventuality with IPv6, which contains enough address space to sustain the Internet for generations. While ARIN will continue to process IPv4 requests through its wait list and the existing transfer market, organizations should be prepared to help usher in the next phase of the Internet by deploying IPv6 as soon as possible.”
“When we designed the Internet 40 years ago, we did some calculations and estimated that 4.3 billion terminations ought to be enough for an experiment. Well, the experiment escaped the lab,” said Vint Cerf, ARIN’s Board Chairman and renowned Internet pioneer. “The Internet is no longer an experiment; it is the lifeblood of commerce, communication and innovation. It needs room to grow and that can only be achieved through the deployment of IPv6 address space.”
ARIN has established a Waiting List for Unmet IPv4 Requests and will process these if it receives any IPv4 addresses from IANA, or when any are recovers from revocations or returns from organizations. ARIN also noted that organizations looking to add or transfer IPv4 space should be aware that the exhaustion of the ARIN free pool does trigger important changes in ARIN’s Specified Transfer Policy and Inter-RIR Transfer Policy. This change specifically impacts those organizations that have been the source entity in a specific IP address space transfer within the last twelve months. Effective today, because exhaustion of the ARIN IPv4 free pool has occurred for the first time, there is no longer a restriction on how often organizations may request transfers to specified recipients.
The attention now shifts to IPv4’s successor, IPv6.
