Understand CIDR and its impact on IP address allocation. Explore how it revolutionized the management of IPv4 addresses.
Posts
RIPE Provider Aggregatable (PA) & Provider Independent (PI) IPv4 Addresses serve distinct purposes within the internet addressing landscape.
Understand the role of IPv4 in internet traffic routing. Explore the challenges it faces and the need for the transition to IPv6.
2022 begins with a market stabilization, albeit much lower than just 1 year ago. ARIN’s IPv4 transfer requests for the month of January was 132 (as demonstrated by the dark blue bar graph below), which is still down -30% since the IPv4 crash in May of 2021. More importantly, transfer requests are still down -20% compared to the average of the last 3 years. It looks like the IPv4 transfer market has established the “New IPv4 Norm” as it relates to the demand on a monthly basis. So what does that mean for prices moving forward?
While we have had a strong run and increase in IPv4 demand over the previous 3-4 months, October seemed to have slowed down a bit. The total number of IPv4 transfer requests in ARIN dropped to 143, which is down -16% from 171 requests in September and -12% from the 163 average requests over the course of 2021.
September IPv4 market trends have been very positive compared to what we saw as the average of the previous 3 months. Signs of life from IPv4 buyers are visible based on the increase of IPv4 transfers requested again from 167 in August to 171 in September.
The month of August 2021 seems to have finally showed a positive trend in the IPv4 transfer market. Figures for IPv4 transfers requested, indicating demand, and transfers completed, indicating supply, have returned to the values we saw at the beginning of the year.
The Cyberspace Administration of China plans to phase out IPv4 usage by implementing large scale IPv6 adoption in three stages ending in 2030. This could potentially impact the global IPv4 market as Chinese companies could sell off existing IPv4 addresses.
As reported in the previous 2 blog posts, the month of May 2021 was a milestone in terms of ARIN IPv4 transfer requests. It was the first time that transfer requests dropped below 100 per month since the market was born in 2015. The volatility continues to have a decreasing trend line with a significantly lower average than the entire 2021 year, and the past 4 years combined.
Due to the volatility in IPv4 transfer market from April to May of 2021, our team was eagerly waiting to see the results of the ARIN transfers from June. There could have been a few different predictions on where the IPv4 market would be headed based purely on the 8.3 transfers requests granted by ARIN, which are indicative of demand.