The RIPE NCC Has Run Out of IPv4 Addresses
The RIPE NCC, the regional internet registry for Europe, West Asia, and the former USSR, has allocated the final /22 remaining in their address pool, and has stated that they have now run out of IPv4 addresses. RIPE will continue to recover IPv4 addresses from organisations that go out of business, close, or that return them due to lack of need, but expects these small amounts of recovered IPv4 addresses to fall well short of demand: RIPE will now only assign IPv4 addresses to entities that have never received any IPv4 allocation in the past, and even then will assign no more than a /24. RIPE puts out a call to action for IPv6 migration: This event is another step on the path towards global exhaustion of the remaining IPv4 addressing space. In recent years, we have seen the emergence of an IPv4 transfer market and greater use of Carrier Grade Network Address Translation (CGNAT) in our region. There are costs and trade-offs with both approaches and neither one solves the underlying problem, which is that there are not enough IPv4 addresses for everyone. Without wide-scale IPv6 deployment, we risk heading into a future where the growth of our Internet is unnecessarily limited — not by a lack of skilled network engineers, technical equipment or investment – but by a shortage of unique network identifiers. There is still a long way to go, and we call on all stakeholders to play their role in supporting the IPv6 roll-out.
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/11/25/1841256/the-ripe-ncc-has-run-out-of-ipv4-addresses
https://www.ripe.net/publications/news/about-ripe-ncc-and-ripe/the-ripe-ncc-has-run-out-of-ipv4-addresses
Anon points out the IATF folks were desperately worried about running out of IPv4 addresses circa mid 1990s when IPv6 addressing was developed and standardized. Well parts of the internet FINALLY got there!