2009 IPv4 Address Use Report

New! The 2009 IPv6 address use report.

As of January first, 2010, the number of unused IPv4 addresses is 722.18 million. On January 1, 2009, this was 925.58 million. So in 2009, 203.4 million addresses were used up. This is the first time since the introduction of CIDR in 1993 that the number of addresses used in a year has topped 200 million. With 3706.65 million usable addresses, 80.5% of the available IPv4 addresses are now in some kind of use, up from 75.3% a year ago. So the depletion of the IPv4 address reserves is continuing in much the same way as in previous years:

Date         Addresses free   Used up
2006-01-01      1468.61 M
2007-01-01      1300.65 M    167.96 M
2008-01-01      1122.85 M    177.80 M (with return of 16.78 M to IANA)
2009-01-01       925.58 M    197.27 M
2010-01-01       722.18 M    203.40 M

These figures are derived from from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority's IANA IPv4 Address Space Registry page and the records published on the FTP servers of the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs): AfriNIC, which gives out address space in Africa, APNIC (Asia-Pacific region), ARIN (North America), LACNIC (Latin American and the Caribbean) and the RIPE NCC (Europe, the former Soviet Union and the Middle East).

The IANA list shows the status of all 256 blocks of 16777216 addresses identified by the first 8-bit number in the IPv4 address. This is a graphical representation of the IANA global pool (updated weekly). The RIR data indicates how much address space the RIRs have delegated to internet service providers (and sometimes end-users). The changes over the course of 2009 are as follows:

Delegated    Blocks  +/- 2009   Addresses      Used     Available
to/status                                 (in millions)

AfriNIC           2                 33.55      14.89       18.66
APNIC            34       +4       570.42     540.36       30.06
ARIN             31                520.09     486.58       33.51
LACNIC            6                100.66      79.77       20.89
RIPE NCC         30       +4       503.32     450.11       53.21
RIRs subtotal   103       +8      1728.05    1571.71      156.34
LEGACY           92               1543.50    1413.88      129.62
UNALLOCATED      26       -8       436.21                 436.21

Totals          221               3707.76    2985.59      722.17

The RIRs requested an unusually small number of /8s from IANA: only eight. As a result, APNIC is well below the nine months working inventory threshold, so it should be getting no less than six additional /8s soon to get back to 18 months working inventory. Similarly, ARIN should be getting five additional /8s soon. This would bring us to 15 /8s remaining in the IANA global pool, and should allow for regular operation for about the rest of the year. Then in early 2011, the next round of delegations will have to happen, which may or may not hit the magic fifth-to-last /8, after which the remaining four will be given to the other four RIRs and then each RIR will run out of IPv4 space at its own pace.

The total number of available addresses is slightly higher than the previously mentioned figure at 3707.76 million because the table above includes 172.16.0.0/12 and 192.168.0.0/16, which are set aside for private use.

Networks 0.0.0.0/8 and 127.0.0.0/8 aren't usable because of special uses and 10.0.0.0/8 is also set aside for private use. 224 - 239 are multicast addresses, and 240 - 255 is class E, which is "reserved for future use".

The 2985 million addresses currently in use aren't very evenly distributed over the countries in the world. The current top 15 is:

                 2010-01-01  2009-01-01    increase  Country

1     -     US   1495.13 M    1458.21 M      2.3%    United States
2     -     CN    232.45 M     181.80 M     27.9%    China
3     -     JP    177.15 M     151.56 M     16.9%    Japan
4     -     EU    149.48 M     120.29 M     24.3%    Multi-country in Europe
5    (6)    DE     86.51 M      81.75 M      5.8%    Germany
6    (9)    KR     77.77 M      66.82 M     16.4%    Korea
7     -     CA     76.96 M      74.49 M      3.3%    Canada
8     -     FR     75.54 M      68.04 M     11.0%    France      
9    (5)    GB     74.18 M      86.31 M    -14.1%    United Kingdom
10    -     AU     39.77 M      36.26 M      9.7%    Australia
11    -     BR     33.95 M      29.75 M     14.1%    Brazil
12    -     IT     33.50 M      29.64 M     13.0%    Italy
13   (14)   RU     28.47 M      23.18 M     22.8%    Russia
14   (13)   TW     27.10 M      24.01 M     12.9%    Taiwan
15   (17)   NL     22.84 M      21.67 M      5.4%    Netherlands

The reduction in address use by the UK is because net 51.0.0.0/8 is now registered as country "EU" rather than "GB". In 2008, the United States was the biggest user of new address space with 50 million new addresses put into use. China was second with 46.50 million. In 2009, they swapped places: China used up 50.65 million addresses and the US a mere 36.92 million.

The US now holds 50.1% of the IPv4 address space in use, down from 52.4% last year. The total for the top 15 excluding the US is now 38%, up from 35.8%. The rest of the world gets the remaining 12%, up from 11.8%.

The size of address blocks given out was increasing until 2005, and then started decreasing. The table below shows the number of delegations for a certain range of block sizes (equal or higher than the first, lower than the second value).

                2003    2004    2005    2006    2007    2008    2009

< 1000           745    1022    1309    1507    1830    1896    1747
1000 - 8000     1009    1516    1891    2265    2839    3235    3185
8000 - 64k      1014    1100    1039    1192    1015    1129    1169
64k - 500k       215     404     309     419     395     410     403
500k - 2M         46      61      60      57      62      82      70
> 2M               6       7      18      17      24      18      21

In millions of addresses:

                2003    2004    2005    2006    2007    2008    2009

< 1000          0.25    0.35    0.44    0.51    0.63    0.65    0.59
1000 - 8000     3.45    4.49    5.07    5.83    6.93    7.75    7.55
8000 - 64k     14.00   15.99   15.46   18.01   15.67   17.40   18.01
64k - 500k     25.51   42.01   34.23   50.86   50.83   52.58   50.50
500k - 2M      31.98   44.63   41.63   46.69   45.50   57.41   49.28
> 2M           12.58   20.97   68.62   52.43   67.37   54.00   54.12

Numbers of delegations and their average size:

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      5457           174.32                31945
2007      6165           186.92                30320
2008      6770           189.79                28035
2009      6595           180.06                27302

(The numbers of addresses given out are lower here because ARIN often attributes the delegation of new addresses to a previous year, this view doesn't correct for that.)

Also see the address use reports for 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008.