Europe's regional internet registry has no more IPv4 addresses to allocate

RIPE NCC made the final /22 IPv4 allocation on 25th November 2019

The RIPE Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC), Europe's regional internet registry, has finally run out of IPv4 addresses.

"Today, at 15:35 (UTC+1) on 25 November 2019, we made our final /22 IPv4 allocation from the last remaining addresses in our available pool. We have now run out of IPv4 addresses," RIPE NCC stated in an online post on its website.

The not-for-profit organisation responsible for allocating IP addresses in 76 countries across Europe, Central Asia, and Middle East, also announced that from this point on, it will allocate the IPv4 addresses that are recovered from organisations that have ceased their operations. But, the number of such recovered addresses will only be a few hundred thousand in one year - nowhere close to millions of addresses currently required by networks.

IPv4 addresses are 32-bit numbers used to identify devices on the internet. There are currently 4.2 billion IPv4 addresses in existence globally, but the quick growth in the number of devices across the world has led to a shortage of supply.

RIPE NCC received its final batch of IPV4 addresses from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) in 2012. Since that time, experts were anticipating an eventual run out of IPv4 addresses.

Despite warning over the past years, IPv6, the successor of IPv4, has not been widely adopted, and accounts for just 24 per cent of the internet traffic. Its usage this year even dropped compared to last year.

The scarcity of IPv4 means network operators will now be required to use expensive and complicated workarounds or to adopt IPv6 in coming days to meet the demands of customers.

The shortage has also led to an extensive black market of used IPv4 addresses, where price for an IPv4 address range from 10-30 euros.

"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," RICE NCC said.

"There is still a long way to go, and we call on all stakeholders to play their role in supporting the IPv6 roll-out."