RIPE NCC Receives Allocation from IANA's Recovered IPv4 Pool

Dear colleagues,

Yesterday, on 20 May 2014, the RIPE NCC and other Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) were allocated what will likely be one of the last significant blocks of IPv4 addresses we receive from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). Each RIR received the equivalent of a /11 of IPv4 address space. The RIPE NCC was allocated the IPv4 address range 45.128.0.0/11 and we are currently adding this to our available pool.

Following the exhaustion of IANA's free pool of IPv4 addresses in 2011, when the RIRs received their final /8s, a global policy caused IANA to create a recovered pool of leftover and returned IPv4 address blocks. This policy was ratified by all five RIR communities in 2012 and stated that IANA would begin making equal, periodic allocations from the recovered pool when the first RIR reached a /9 of remaining addresses. This point was reached by LACNIC, the RIR for Latin America and the Caribbean yesterday, which triggered the global policy and thus the first post-exhaustion allocation from IANA.

You can read the global policy here:
http://www.icann.org/en/resources/policy/global-addressing/allocation-ipv4-post-exhaustion

Now that the policy is active, the RIPE NCC will receive one-fifth of any recovered addresses in the pool every six months (every March and September). The RIPE NCC will continue to distribute these according to the current last /8 policy, under which LIRs may receive a one-time /22 allocation (1,024 addresses).

With yet another RIR reaching IPv4 exhaustion, it is important that network operators continue to deploy IPv6 on their networks to ensure the future growth of the Internet. More information on IPv6 deployment can be found here:
www.ipv6actnow.com

Kind regards

Andrew de la Haye
Chief Operations Officer
RIPE NCC