And what a week it’s been!  As I posted yesterday, RIPE ran out of IPv4 addresses above the final /8 (for which special rules apply), effectively exhausting the supply in Europe.  I was predicting Tuesday of next week, personally, so all said and done, a nice way to end the week.

RIPE tweeted a link to the photo of the moment that the button was pressed – you can find the tweet here and the actual photo here

Even the Huston-o-Meter has been updated out-of-sequence yesterday, so he now accurately records the actual exhaustion date.  Still not sure why as of today his figure stands at 1.04 or so though, or even why the RIPE graph is still claiming 17.30 million addresses (1.0.3 /8s) – what’s the extra 0.03 /8s for?

So, the bit you’re all asking, who got the final blocks?  Well, a whopping 109 allocations were made yesterday.  Sifting through the data, the largest block allocated was to H3G S.p.A. of Italy which was a /14.  There was a /15 allocated to EWE TEL GmbH of Germany, and /16s allocated to Jump Internet Services SRL of Romania and Swisscom (Schweiz) AG of Switzerland.  /17s were allocated to Inspiring Networks B.V. i.o. of the Netherlands and Jump Internet Services SRL of Romania.  /18s went to YANDEX LLC of Russia, MSP Format Ltd of Ukraine, Host Europe GmbH of Germany, and Jump Internet Services SRL of Romania.

I won’t list everything else under that as it would take ages, but it seems that poor old Jump at least were given split blocks.  There were also 43 separate allocations, some as small as /29, to LIRs in Cyprus.

And so that’s it, that’s the end!  All I wish now is that all the ISPs in the UK (and probably plenty of other countries too) that haven’t moved to offering IPv6 to end users already (and that’s most of them) would actually take their head out the sand and do something about it!  (Believe it or not, even Virgin Media has a /24 of IPv6 allocated which they’re not currently allocating any of to their retail customers yet…)

And don’t forget the obligatory singing of the now-famous song of course.  Now, where’s my deckchair and popcorn … ?