According to AfriNIC, APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC and RIPE NCC statistics as
published on their respective FTP servers, they gave out 165.45
million IPv4 addresses in 2005. Out of 3706.65 million usable IPv4
addresses, 1468.61 million are still available as of januari 1, 2006.
Breakdown by Regional Internet Registry over the past few years:
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
AfriNIC 0.56 0.38 0.25 0.21 0.51 1.89
APNIC 21.08 28.84 27.08 33.08 42.92 53.97
ARIN 30.96 32.76 21.02 22.14 33.51 36.30
LACNIC 0.88 1.57 0.65 2.62 3.77 11.04
RIPE NCC 24.88 25.39 19.94 29.72 47.75 62.25
Total 78.35 88.95 68.93 87.77 128.45 165.45
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.
Note that the RIRs tend to change their records retroactively from
time to time. For instance, the januari 1, 2005 records show that
only 117.3 million addresses were given out in 2004. Also, reclaimed
address space isn't listed explicitly. From the fact that the
1-1-2005 records show 1939 million addresses given out before 2004
but the 1-1-2006 records show 1928.48 million addresses for the same
period, we can conclude that 11.15 million addresses given out before
2004 have been reclaimed in 2005.
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 Addresses (millions)
AfriNIC 1 16.78
APNIC 16 268.44
ARIN 23 385.88
LACNIC 4 67.11
RIPE NCC 19 318.77
Various 50 838.86
End-user 43 721.42
Available 65 1090.52
Of the 1895.83 million addresses delegated to the five Regional
Internet Registries, 1517.74 million have been delegated to end-users
or ISPs by the RIRs, and 378.09 million are still available. Along
with the 1090.52 million addresses still available in the IANA global
pool this makes the total number of available addresses 1468.61 million.
The size of address blocks given follows an interesting trend. 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).
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
< 1000 326 474 547 745 1022 1309
1000 - 8000 652 1176 897 1009 1516 1891
8000 - 64k 1440 868 822 1014 1100 1039
64k - 500k 354 262 163 215 404 309
500k - 2M 19 39 29 46 61 60
> 2M 3 5 5 6 7 18
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
< 1000 0.10 0.16 0.18 0.25 0.35 0.44
1000 - 8000 2.42 4.47 3.23 3.45 4.49 5.07
8000 - 64k 18.79 12.81 11.35 14.00 15.99 15.46
64k - 500k 35.98 32.19 20.28 25.51 42.01 34.23
500k - 2M 12.68 24.64 21.30 31.98 44.63 41.63
> 2M 8.39 14.68 12.58 12.58 20.97 68.62
The medium-sized blocks seem most affected by the burst of the
internet bubble.
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
The 2222.38 million addresses currently in use aren't very evenly
distributed over the countries in the world. The current top 15 is:
Country Addresses
US 1324.93 M United States
JP 143.00 M Japan
EU 113.87 M Multi-country in Europe
CN 74.39 M China
CA 67.43 M Canada
DE 51.13 M Germany
FR 45.16 M France
KR 41.91 M Korea
UK 40.18 M United Kingdom
GB 33.63 M Great Britain
AU 26.87 M Australia
IT 18.39 M Italy
BR 17.17 M Brazil
NL 16.40 M Netherlands
ES 16.29 M Spain
The US holds 60% of the IPv4 address space. The other countries in
the list together hold another 32%.
A copy of this information and a tool to perform queries on the base
data is available at http://www.bgpexpert.com/addrspace2005.php
