The IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority – www.iana.org) has allocated the last IP address blocks from the global IPv4 central address pool, ending all debates over when this would happen.
Several months remain before Regional Registries consume all their remaining regional IPv4 address pools, with recent trends suggesting that Asia, Europe, and North America will exhaust in that order within a month or two on either side of July 1, 2011.
The prediction for exhaustion of the remaining IPv4 addresses held by the regional registries is now the subject of debate.
The Regional Registry for the Asia Pacific region – APNIC – is predicted to run out first, sometime around the middle of this year. The exact outcome will depend on many factors which are difficult to predict at this time, but this timeframe provides a useful guide.
It should also be emphasised that exhaustion in the APNIC region is driven by the needs of our Asian neighbors, including India and China, rather than ourselves. However, it does put pressure on the adoption of IPv6 in New Zealand in order to stay in touch with our neighbors.
For more information view APNIC’s press release below: