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2006 IPv4 Address Use Report

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.) 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%).

Use the form below to query a (more or less) up-to-date copy of the base data.

Start date >=
End date <
RIR =
Country =
Query type
 
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