[ipv6-wg] 2005 IPv4 Address Use Report

According to AfriNIC, APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC and RIPE NCC statistics as  
published on their respective FTP servers, they gave out 165.45  
million IPv4 addresses in 2005. Out of 3706.65 million usable IPv4  
addresses, 1468.61 million are still available as of januari 1, 2006.

Breakdown by Regional Internet Registry over the past few years:

                 2000    2001    2002    2003    2004    2005

AfriNIC         0.56    0.38    0.25    0.21    0.51    1.89
APNIC          21.08   28.84   27.08   33.08   42.92   53.97
ARIN           30.96   32.76   21.02   22.14   33.51   36.30
LACNIC          0.88    1.57    0.65    2.62    3.77   11.04
RIPE NCC       24.88   25.39   19.94   29.72   47.75   62.25

Total          78.35   88.95   68.93   87.77  128.45  165.45

AfriNIC gives out address space in Africa, APNIC in the Asia-Pacific  
region, ARIN in North America, LACNIC in Latin American and the  
Caribbean and the RIPE NCC in Europe, the former Soviet Union and the  
Middle East.

Note that the RIRs tend to change their records retroactively from  
time to time. For instance, the januari 1, 2005 records show that  
only 117.3 million addresses were given out in 2004. Also, reclaimed  
address space isn't listed explicitly. From the fact that the  
1-1-2005 records show 1939 million addresses given out before 2004  
but the 1-1-2006 records show 1928.48 million addresses for the same  
period, we can conclude that 11.15 million addresses given out before  
2004 have been reclaimed in 2005.

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA, part of ICANN) keeps  
an overview of the IPv4 address space at http://www.iana.org/ 
assignments/ipv4-address-space. The list consists of 256 blocks of  
16.78 million addresses. Breakdown:

Delegated to   Blocks   Addresses (millions)

AfriNIC             1       16.78
APNIC              16      268.44
ARIN               23      385.88
LACNIC              4       67.11
RIPE NCC           19      318.77
Various            50      838.86
End-user           43      721.42
Available          65     1090.52

Of the 1895.83 million addresses delegated to the five Regional  
Internet Registries, 1517.74 million have been delegated to end-users  
or ISPs by the RIRs, and 378.09 million are still available. Along  
with the 1090.52 million addresses still available in the IANA global  
pool this makes the total number of available addresses 1468.61 million.

The size of address blocks given follows an interesting trend. The  
table below shows the number of requests for a certain range of block  
sizes (equal or higher than the first, lower than the second value).

                 2000    2001    2002    2003    2004    2005

< 1000           326     474     547     745    1022    1309
1000 - 8000      652    1176     897    1009    1516    1891
8000 - 64k      1440     868     822    1014    1100    1039
64k - 500k       354     262     163     215     404     309
500k - 2M         19      39      29      46      61      60
 > 2M               3       5       5       6       7      18

The number of blocks in the two smallest categories have increased  
rapidly, but not as fast as the number of blocks in the largest  
category, in relative numbers at least. However, the increase in  
large blocks has a very dramatic effect while the small blocks are  
insignificant, when looking at the millions of addresses involved:

                 2000    2001    2002    2003    2004    2005

< 1000          0.10    0.16    0.18    0.25    0.35    0.44
1000 - 8000     2.42    4.47    3.23    3.45    4.49    5.07
8000 - 64k     18.79   12.81   11.35   14.00   15.99   15.46
64k - 500k     35.98   32.19   20.28   25.51   42.01   34.23
500k - 2M      12.68   24.64   21.30   31.98   44.63   41.63
 > 2M            8.39   14.68   12.58   12.58   20.97   68.62

The medium-sized blocks seem most affected by the burst of the  
internet bubble.

Another way to look at the same data:

Year    Blocks    Addresses (M)   Average block size

2000      2794            78.35                28043
2001      2824            88.95                31497
2002      2463            68.93                27985
2003      3035            87.77                28921
2004      4110           128.45                31252
2005      4626           165.45                35765

The 2222.38 million addresses currently in use aren't very evenly  
distributed over the countries in the world. The current top 15 is:

Country   Addresses

   US      1324.93 M            United States
   JP       143.00 M            Japan
   EU       113.87 M            Multi-country in Europe
   CN        74.39 M            China
   CA        67.43 M            Canada
   DE        51.13 M            Germany
   FR        45.16 M            France
   KR        41.91 M            Korea
   UK        40.18 M            United Kingdom
   GB        33.63 M            Great Britain
   AU        26.87 M            Australia
   IT        18.39 M            Italy
   BR        17.17 M            Brazil
   NL        16.40 M            Netherlands
   ES        16.29 M            Spain

The US holds 60% of the IPv4 address space. The other countries in  
the list together hold another 32%.

A copy of this information and a tool to perform queries on the base  
data is available at http://www.bgpexpert.com/addrspace2005.php