[ipv6-wg] 2006 IPv4 Address Use Report

2006 was another busy year for the five Regional Internet Registries:  
together, they gave out 161.48 million IPv4 addresses, just shy of  
the 165.45 million given out in 2005 as measured on january first 2006.

The current (jan 1st, 2007) figure for 2005 is 175.52 million  
addresses. Together with adjustments for earlier years, this brings  
the total addresses available to almost exactly 1.3 billion, down  
from 1468.61 million a year ago. This is out of 3706.65 million  
usable IPv4 addresses, so 2407.11 million addresses are currently  
given out to either end-users or Internet Service Providers.

Breakdown by Regional Internet Registry over the past few years as  
seen on 2007-01-01:

                 2000    2001    2002    2003    2004    2005    2006

AfriNIC         0.56    0.39    0.26    0.22    0.51    1.03    2.72
APNIC          20.94   28.83   27.03   33.05   42.89   53.86   51.78
ARIN           30.83   28.55   21.08   22.32   34.26   47.57   38.94
LACNIC          0.88    1.61    0.65    2.62    3.77   10.97   11.50
RIPE NCC       24.79   25.36   19.84   29.61   47.49   62.09   56.53

Total          78.00   84.73   68.87   87.82  128.92  175.52  161.48

Compare this to the totals as seen on 2006-01-01:

Total          78.35   88.95   68.93   87.77  128.45  165.45

(See last year's report for more details at http://www.bgpexpert.com/ 
addrspace2005.php )

The main reason for the discrepancy is that the RIRs publish on their  
respective FTP servers lists of which address block was given out  
when. When a block of address space is given back by the holder, it's  
removed from the list. This is the reason why the numbers for earlier  
years keep going down. The 10 million extra addresses in 2005 and 4  
million in 2001 are the responsibility of ARIN, which went from 36.30  
million addresses for 2005 in their 2006-01-01 records to 47.56 in  
their 2007-01-01 records. The reason for the retroactive growth is  
unknown.

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.

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   +/- 2006   Addresses (millions)

AfriNIC             1                  16.78
APNIC              19      +3         318.77
ARIN               27      +4         452.98
LACNIC              4                  67.11
RIPE NCC           22      +3         369.10
Various            50                 838.86
End-user           43                 721.42
Available          55     -10         922.74

Of the 2063.60 million addresses delegated to the five Regional  
Internet Registries, 1685.69 million have been delegated to end-users  
or ISPs by the RIRs, and 377.91 million are still available, which is  
almost identical to last year's 378.09 number. Along with the 922.74  
million addresses still available in the IANA global pool this makes  
the total number of available addresses 1300.65 million, down 167.96  
million from a year earlier.

The size of address blocks given has been increasing steadily. 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).

(2005 and earlier values from 2006-01-01 data, 2006 values from  
2007-01-01 data.)

                 2000    2001    2002    2003    2004    2005    2006

< 1000           326     474     547     745    1022    1309    1526
1000 - 8000      652    1176     897    1009    1516    1891    2338
8000 - 64k      1440     868     822    1014    1100    1039    1133
64k - 500k       354     262     163     215     404     309     409
500k - 2M         19      39      29      46      61      60      56
 > 2M               3       5       5       6       7      18      13

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    2006

< 1000          0.10    0.16    0.18    0.25    0.35    0.44    0.52
1000 - 8000     2.42    4.47    3.23    3.45    4.49    5.07    6.10
8000 - 64k     18.79   12.81   11.35   14.00   15.99   15.46   17.17
64k - 500k     35.98   32.19   20.28   25.51   42.01   34.23   49.64
500k - 2M      12.68   24.64   21.30   31.98   44.63   41.63   46.64
 > 2M            8.39   14.68   12.58   12.58   20.97   68.62   41.42

The increase in the 2M+ blocks was solely responsible for the high  
number of addresses given out in 2005. In 2006, there was growth in  
all categories except the 2M+ one (even the 500k - 2M category  
increased in number of addresses if not in number of blocks). When  
the 2M+ blocks are taken out of the equation, 2005 had a total of  
96.83 million addresses (2006-01-01) and 2006 119.06 million given out.

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
2006      5475           161.48                29494

The 2407.11 million addresses currently in use aren't very evenly  
distributed over the countries in the world. The current top 15 is:

Country  Addresses 2007-01-01   Addr 2006-01-01

   US          1366.53 M            1324.93 M      United States
   JP           151.27 M             143.00 M      Japan
   EU           115.83 M             113.87 M      Multi-country in  
Europe
   CN            98.02 M              74.39 M      China
   GB            93.91 M              73.81 M      United Kingdom
   CA            71.32 M              67.43 M      Canada
   DE            61.59 M              51.13 M      Germany
   FR            58.23 M              45.16 M      France
   KR            51.13 M              41.91 M      Korea
   AU            30.64 M              26.87 M      Australia
   BR            19.27 M              17.17 M      Brazil
   IT            19.14 M              18.39 M      Italy
   ES            18.69 M              16.29 M      Spain
   TW            18.16 M              16.28 M      Taiwan
   NL            18.08 M              16.40 M      Netherlands

The US holds 57% (down from 60% a year ago) of the IPv4 address space  
in use. The other countries in the list together hold another 34% (up  
from 32%). The rest of the world has 9% (up from 8%).

A copy of this information and a tool to perform queries on up to  
date data is available at http://www.bgpexpert.com/addrspace2006.php