North America Runs Out Of New IPv4 Addresses

The need to adopt IPv6 became a little more urgent this week when ARIN was unable to meet a request for IPv4 addresses.The request, the American Registry for Internet Numbers said, was larger than the available inventory in the regional IPv4 free pool.”If you take a smaller block, you can’t come back for more address space for 90 days,” John Curran, CEO of ARIN, told ArsTechnica. “We currently have nearly 500 small blocks remaining, but we handle 300 to 400 requests per month, [so] those remaining small blocks are going to last between two and four weeks.”ARIN allocates addresses for Canada, the USA and North Atlantic and Caribbean islands, has now joined its counterparts being unable to meet demand for IPv4 addresses. It has also seen companies willing to spend large amounts to purchase IPv4 addresses. For example, back in 2011 Microsoft paid Nortel $7.5m for 666,624 IPv4 addresses.ARIN still has limited amounts of IPv4 address space available in smaller block sizes and they encourage customers to monitor the IPv4 Inventory Counter on the ARIN homepage and the breakdown of the remaining IPv4 inventory found on their IPv4 Depletion page:
https://www.arin.net/resources/request/ipv4_countdown.htmlOrganisations needing larger amounts of address space are encouraged to make use of the IPv4 transfer market for those needs. ARIN is also reminding organisations of the ample availability of IPv6 address space, and encourages organisations to evaluate IPv6 address space for their ongoing public internet network activities.