RIPE NCC and APNIC close to doom date

In the previous article I have shown the distribution of the IANA IPv4 /8 prefix assignment over different local registries: APNIC, ARIN, AFRINIC, RIPE NCC, LACNIC and the special purpose addresses. Now I would like to go into details about the current situation in different registries - for that purpose I have modified a bit the Ruby tooling so that it shows and forecasts the exhaustion of the IPv4 address space on a per registry basis.

First chart below presents the comparison between the number of /8 prefixes that were assigned to a local RIR and the number of prefixes allocated by the RIR. Actually what is surprisng that the two registries that have the biggest dynamics in the IPv4 assignments are in the worst situation - namely RIPE NCC and APNIC have the smallest number of addresses available for assignment.

On one hand the chart above gives a good overview about the available address space within each registry but it does not give any information about the trend and the dynamics in the allocations (which can be used to make the forecast when the address space will be exhausted). The charts below show the growth in the assignment on a per registry basis. Additionally there have been a trend line added for the forecasting purposes. In addition to the chart the doom date has been calculated by my tooling and the results are as follows:

• RIPENCC -> 29.07.2011
• APNIC -> 21.09.2011
• AFRINIC -> 29.10.2016
• ARIN -> 03.01.2018
• LACNIC -> 16.11.2012

It means if the situation does not change the Europe will be the first one that will suffer from lack of public IPv4 addresses for assignment. Two months later the Asian/Pacific region will run into the same toruble. Next months will show if the allocation dynamics will remain as they are and IANA does not use the "E pool". However in my opinion we should observe much bigger interest and movement in the IPv6 area from now on.