2006 was another busy year for the five Regional Internet Registries: together, they gave out 161.48 million IPv4 addresses, just shy of the 165.45 million given out in 2005 as measured on january first 2006. The current (jan 1st, 2007) figure for 2005 is 175.52 million addresses. Together with adjustments for earlier years, this brings the total addresses available to almost exactly 1.3 billion, down from 1468.61 million a year ago. This is out of 3706.65 million usable IPv4 addresses, so 2407.11 million addresses are currently given out to either end-users or Internet Service Providers. Breakdown by Regional Internet Registry over the past few years as seen on 2007-01-01: 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 AfriNIC 0.56 0.39 0.26 0.22 0.51 1.03 2.72 APNIC 20.94 28.83 27.03 33.05 42.89 53.86 51.78 ARIN 30.83 28.55 21.08 22.32 34.26 47.57 38.94 LACNIC 0.88 1.61 0.65 2.62 3.77 10.97 11.50 RIPE NCC 24.79 25.36 19.84 29.61 47.49 62.09 56.53 Total 78.00 84.73 68.87 87.82 128.92 175.52 161.48 Compare this to the totals as seen on 2006-01-01: Total 78.35 88.95 68.93 87.77 128.45 165.45 (See last year's report for more details at http://www.bgpexpert.com/ addrspace2005.php ) The main reason for the discrepancy is that the RIRs publish on their respective FTP servers lists of which address block was given out when. When a block of address space is given back by the holder, it's removed from the list. This is the reason why the numbers for earlier years keep going down. The 10 million extra addresses in 2005 and 4 million in 2001 are the responsibility of ARIN, which went from 36.30 million addresses for 2005 in their 2006-01-01 records to 47.56 in their 2007-01-01 records. The reason for the retroactive growth is unknown. AfriNIC gives out address space in Africa, APNIC in the Asia-Pacific region, ARIN in North America, LACNIC in Latin American and the Caribbean and the RIPE NCC in Europe, the former Soviet Union and the Middle East. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA, part of ICANN) keeps an overview of the IPv4 address space at http://www.iana.org/ assignments/ipv4-address-space. The list consists of 256 blocks of 16.78 million addresses. Breakdown: Delegated to Blocks +/- 2006 Addresses (millions) AfriNIC 1 16.78 APNIC 19 +3 318.77 ARIN 27 +4 452.98 LACNIC 4 67.11 RIPE NCC 22 +3 369.10 Various 50 838.86 End-user 43 721.42 Available 55 -10 922.74 Of the 2063.60 million addresses delegated to the five Regional Internet Registries, 1685.69 million have been delegated to end-users or ISPs by the RIRs, and 377.91 million are still available, which is almost identical to last year's 378.09 number. Along with the 922.74 million addresses still available in the IANA global pool this makes the total number of available addresses 1300.65 million, down 167.96 million from a year earlier. The size of address blocks given has been increasing steadily. The table below shows the number of requests for a certain range of block sizes (equal or higher than the first, lower than the second value). (2005 and earlier values from 2006-01-01 data, 2006 values from 2007-01-01 data.) 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 < 1000 326 474 547 745 1022 1309 1526 1000 - 8000 652 1176 897 1009 1516 1891 2338 8000 - 64k 1440 868 822 1014 1100 1039 1133 64k - 500k 354 262 163 215 404 309 409 500k - 2M 19 39 29 46 61 60 56

2M 3 5 5 6 7 18 13

The number of blocks in the two smallest categories have increased rapidly, but not as fast as the number of blocks in the largest category, in relative numbers at least. However, the increase in large blocks has a very dramatic effect while the small blocks are insignificant, when looking at the millions of addresses involved: 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 < 1000 0.10 0.16 0.18 0.25 0.35 0.44 0.52 1000 - 8000 2.42 4.47 3.23 3.45 4.49 5.07 6.10 8000 - 64k 18.79 12.81 11.35 14.00 15.99 15.46 17.17 64k - 500k 35.98 32.19 20.28 25.51 42.01 34.23 49.64 500k - 2M 12.68 24.64 21.30 31.98 44.63 41.63 46.64

2M 8.39 14.68 12.58 12.58 20.97 68.62 41.42

The increase in the 2M+ blocks was solely responsible for the high number of addresses given out in 2005. In 2006, there was growth in all categories except the 2M+ one (even the 500k - 2M category increased in number of addresses if not in number of blocks). When the 2M+ blocks are taken out of the equation, 2005 had a total of 96.83 million addresses (2006-01-01) and 2006 119.06 million given out. Another way to look at the same data: Year Blocks Addresses (M) Average block size 2000 2794 78.35 28043 2001 2824 88.95 31497 2002 2463 68.93 27985 2003 3035 87.77 28921 2004 4110 128.45 31252 2005 4626 165.45 35765 2006 5475 161.48 29494 The 2407.11 million addresses currently in use aren't very evenly distributed over the countries in the world. The current top 15 is: Country Addresses 2007-01-01 Addr 2006-01-01 US 1366.53 M 1324.93 M United States JP 151.27 M 143.00 M Japan EU 115.83 M 113.87 M Multi-country in Europe CN 98.02 M 74.39 M China GB 93.91 M 73.81 M United Kingdom CA 71.32 M 67.43 M Canada DE 61.59 M 51.13 M Germany FR 58.23 M 45.16 M France KR 51.13 M 41.91 M Korea AU 30.64 M 26.87 M Australia BR 19.27 M 17.17 M Brazil IT 19.14 M 18.39 M Italy ES 18.69 M 16.29 M Spain TW 18.16 M 16.28 M Taiwan NL 18.08 M 16.40 M Netherlands The US holds 57% (down from 60% a year ago) of the IPv4 address space in use. The other countries in the list together hold another 34% (up from 32%). The rest of the world has 9% (up from 8%). A copy of this information and a tool to perform queries on up to date data is available at http://www.bgpexpert.com/addrspace2006.php