Waiting Times for IPv4 Addresses Increase

16/08/2022

According to LACNIC’s current estimates based on IPv4 address recovery in the region, organizations that join the IPv4 Address Waiting List today will only see their demand for addresses satisfied five years from now and will only be able to receive a maximum of 1.024 IPv4 addresses.

The organizations that are currently receiving addresses from the recovered address space had to wait an average of 580 days, compared to a 340-day waiting time a year ago.  In August 2021, 650 organizations were part of the list; currently, that number has reached 820 members.

“The number of requests received each month cannot be met with the space recovered or returned to LACNIC. This is why waiting times continue to grow as time goes by,” LACNIC Services Manager Alfredo Verderosa explained.

The waiting list was created on 19 August 2020 when the last available IPv4 address block was assigned, and its purpose is to create an order among organizations requesting IPv4 addresses. To be included on the list, an organization must be a LACNIC member and must have already been assigned IPv6 resources.

Before being assigned to an organization on the waiting list, addresses go through a six-month quarantine process —there are currently between 35 thousand and 40 thousand IPv4 addresses under quarantine— to make sure that they are not being announced or blacklisted and filtered, and that they effectively belong to the region.

According to Verderosa and based on current resource recovery behavior, requests added to the IPv4 waiting list today will receive resources during the second half of 2027. “This is not an exact date and may vary, as it is an estimate based on historical information. It is impossible to know exactly how many IPv4 address blocks will be recovered over the next few months,” he added.

In this sense, Verderosa highlighted the importance of working with IPv6 and stressed that the key is the deployment of this protocol in the region. The most recent statistics on the increase in traffic and the number of users with the latest version of the protocol show that this is the path for operators, organizations, and governments, as there are no waiting times for IPv6 addresses in the LACNIC region.