Waiting List: Seven-Year Wait to Receive IPv4 Addresses

17/07/2023

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 seven years from now and will only be able to receive a maximum of 1024 IPv4 addresses. Twelve months ago, the estimated wait time to acquire these addresses was five years.

In August 2022, 820 organizations were part of the list; currently, that number has reached 1070 members.

“Although the number of organizations joining the Waiting List has slowed down, the number of requests received each month cannot be met with the space recovered or returned to LACNIC,” LACNIC Services Manager Alfredo Verderosa explained.

The organizations that are currently receiving addresses from the recovered space had to wait approximately 825 days.

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 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 in 2030.

“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.