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IPv4 exhaustion has been anticipated since 2012, when the RIPE NCC reached its final allocation of addresses from IANA. The successor to IPv4, IPv6, has not been widely adopted, and much of the Internet today still runs on the older IPv4 network. The run out has serious ramifications, as operators might be obliged to use complex and expensive workarounds or to adopt IPv6.
Nikolas Pediaditis, Registration Services and Policy Development Manager at the RIPE NCC commented: “With IPv4 exhaustion, we risk heading into a future where the growth of our Internet is unnecessarily limited – not by a lack of skilled network engineers, technical equipment, or investment – but by a shortage of unique network identifiers. Therefore, we call on all stakeholders to play their role in supporting the roll-out of IPv6.”
IPv4 scarcity is a big concern for the RIPE community. In a survey of 4,161 network operators and other stakeholders in 2019, a third of the respondents ranked IPv4 run-out as among the top-three challenges facing their organisation. Over half (54%) also said they will need more IPv4 addresses in the next two to three years.
In recent years, this scarcity has fuelled a substantial secondary market in used IPv4 addresses. In 2018, 12,247,168 IPv4 addresses were transferred between networks in the RIPE NCC’s service region alone. With prices reported to range from 10-30 EUR per address, the IPv4 transfer market is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars globally. With the steep rise in the financial value of IPv4 addresses, the RIPE NCC has also recently reported seeing more attempts to hijack IPv4 addresses or obtain them by fraud.
