Asia Pacific's IPv4 address allocation is nearly gone as the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), one of the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) that distributes IP addresses, announced this week that it has reached the final /8 IPv4 address block.
By reaching this final IPv4 address block, APNIC said they are now heading into stage three of IPv4 exhaustion in the Asia Pacific. During stage three, APNIC will focus its attention on two sets of users: IPv4 address space for new entrants to the market and for those deploying IPv6.
Asia Pacific has been very active in allocating IPv4 addresses. In just the first months alone this year, APNIC said it allocated more than 58 million IPv4 addresses to major service providers such as Japan's incumbent operator NTT (NYSE: NTT), China Mobile and KDDI.
As one of the the Internet's first five regional Internet registries to almost deplete its allocated IPv4 addresses, APNIC's announcement should serve as a warning for businesses and ISPs that have not put an IPv4-to-IPv6 migration plan in motion.
"For anybody who hasn't figured out that it's time to do IPv6, this is another wake-up call for them," Owen DeLong, an IPv6 evangelist at Hurricane Electric and a member of the board of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the North American counterpart to APNIC, told Network World.
It appears that a growing number of end-users and ISPs are heeding DeLong's warning. During the first three months of this year, ARIN reported that there were 253 ISP IPv6 247 End-user IPv6 requests.
For more:
- here's APNIC's announcement
- Network World has this article
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