[address-policy-wg] New and Improved IPv4 Address Space Chart

Dear colleagues,

During policy discussions, we often see people asking how long the RIPE NCC’s available IPv4 pool
will last. This is a good question, as more than three years after the last /8 policy was
activated, we still have almost an entire /8 still remaining in our pool. This is made more
confusing by the regular allocations we have been receiving from IANA since 2014, which have been
counteracting the reduction in addresses that we should have seen due to /22 allocations.

To more accurately show the status of our remaining pool, we have updated our IPv4 Address Space
Chart, which you can find here:

    https://www.ripe.net/publications/ipv6-info-centre/about-ipv6/ipv4-exhaustion/ipv4-available-pool-graph	


The updated chart makes the distinction between addresses from the last /8, and addresses that
were received from IANA’s Recovered IPv4 Pool (as well as addresses recovered from our service
region). We have also published a short article on RIPE Labs with some additional detail about
our IPv4 pool:

    https://labs.ripe.net/Members/marco_schmidt/taking-a-closer-look-at-the-last-slash-8


We hope this will help to inform the community’s policy discussions.

Kind regards

Marco Schmidt
Policy Development Officer
RIPE NCC