The year/decade in IP addresses

For the fifth time now, I wrote an IPv4 address use report over the previous year for this site. And, for the first time, an IPv6 address use report. In addition, I wrote an article for Ars Technica about the IPv4 address use the past year and the past decade. From the Ars article:

Today, ten years later, 2,985 million addresses (81 percent) are in use, and 722 million are still free. In that time, the number of addresses used per year increased from 79 million in 2000 to 203 million in 2009. So it's a near certainty that before Barack Obama vacates the White House, we'll be out of IPv4 address. (Even if he doesn't get re-elected.)

• A decade's worth of IPv4 addresses
• 2009 IPv4 Address Use Report
• 2009 IPv6 Address Use Report

2009 IPv4 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.

2009 IPv6 Address Use Report

Since 2005, I've been compiling an IPv4 address use report every year. With the start of the new decade, this is a good moment to start doing the same thing for IPv6.