"It's the end of the world as we know it" -- REM

Wed Apr 24 10:37:45 UTC 2013

On 24/04/2013, at 6:55 PM, Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike at swm.pp.se> wrote:

> I also find it a bit strange that the runout in APNIC and RIPE was very different. APNIC address allocation rate accelerated at the end, whereas RIPE exhaustion date kept creeping forward in time instead of closer in time, giving me the impression that there wasn't any panic there.
> 
> Has anyone done any detailed analysis of the last year of allocation behaviour for each of these regions, trying to understand the difference in behaviour? I'd be very interested in this.
> 
> My belief (not well founded) is that ARIN runout will look more like RIPE region than APNIC...
> 

I suspect that the extent of communication of expectations, the economic climate, the prevailing allocation window at the time (RIPE was working on 3 months whereas APNIC still had the 12 month window in place right up to the last /8) all play a part in such things. 

The fast/slow nature of ARIN's address consumption profile over the last 30 months is certainly a new factor here - again there is likely to be some interplay between economics, the saturation of the wired market in that region, and the  existing CGN deployments in some (much) of the mobile IPv4 space in North America which also give some credibility to a prediction of a more measured approach to exhaustion rather than a massive paniced run on what's left.

But then again APNIC and RIPE NCC both had last /8 policies in place, which has mitigated some of the impacts of address pool exhaustion. For smaller actors there is still a source of addresses in these regions, albeit a very limited trickle of addresses, but there is still some.  As I understand it, ARIN will continue allocating right to the end of their IPv4 address pool and not hold back any addresses for this "last chance" trickle feed, or have I missed something crucial in ARIN's policy handbook?

Geoff