Just a month and a half until the final phase of IPv4 exhaustion

31/01/2017

The IPv4 addresses reserved for Phase 2 of the exhaustion process are about to run out, after which allocations will only be made to those requesting such resources for the first time, said Sergio Rojas, a Registry Service specialist at the Internet Address Registry for Latin America and the Caribbean, the organization responsible for allocating resources in the LAC region.
According to current projections, Phase 2 will come to an end in early March, after which the policy defined for Phase 3 of Internet resource exhaustion (the final phase) will come into force. Under this policy, only those who have not yet received IPv4 addresses will be able to request these resources.

Exhaustion proyection – Phase 2

Taking into account the allocations behavior since June 2014, time when we started this phase, below it is shown a different projection modeling with the estimated exhaustion dates.

Current phase. The little more than four million IPv4 addresses reserved for depletion Phase 2 have been allocated almost entirely (see graph below). According to the policies implemented by the LACNIC community, during this phase (which began on 10 June, 2014), the maximum allocation size is a /22 (1,024 IP addresses) and the minimum a /24 (256 IP addresses).

Status of IPv4 /10- Phase 2

The following chart show how this /10 were distributed through the members.

Projections predict that, by the beginning of March, all Phase 2 IPv4 addresses will have been assigned, triggering Phase 3, for which there is a pool of 4,698,112 addresses.
As agreed by the regional community, during Phase 3, organizations that have already received IPv4 space from LACNIC will not be able to request additional resources. In addition, each new member may only receive an initial assignment from this space and only assignments between 1,024 (/22) and 256 (/24) IP addresses will be allowed.
Rojas pointed out that, in this scenario, the need to deploy the IPv6 protocol is a reality that cannot be delayed if providers and operators wish to meet the demands of their customers and new users.
LACNIC and the Internet community have been working for years in preparation for this moment, so the region is well-prepared to cope with this situation in the best way possible.